So we built the website up, fortunately enough for me, and I think this is a critical component, analysis tools. So my .
http://www.treptalks.com
Interview with Zeb Welborn Transcript Sushant: Hey TREPS! This is Sushant, founder and host of TrepTalks. Joining me today is Mr. Zeb Welborn. Zeb is the President of Welborn Social Media and also the Tutoring Solution. Basically, through his social media company, he helps business owners become successful by harnessing the power of Internet and social media, get more customers and make stronger relationships with existing customers. He is also the Founder and Host of the Defining Success podcast. Today I wanted to speak with him because he has a very interesting entrepreneurial story, and I thought that any aspiring entrepreneur who wants to start his own business, will probably find it interesting and probably can learn a few lessons from it. I really appreciate your time today Zeb. Welcome to my show! Zeb: Of course. Thanks for having me. Sushant: Let’s get started. As I understand, you started off as a high school teacher teaching History to students. And what happened then? You decided to start a business? What happened that made you decide, “No I don’t want to teach anymore, I want to do something else.”? Zeb: It’s kind of a long story. I think as with everything there’s always multiple reasons why you kind of change paths. So when I first started teaching, I was a teacher and I got married to the girl that I was dating since college. While I was teaching, I really had a stronger sense that I wasn’t able to have the impact that I wanted on certain kids. I would work an exorbant amount of hours. And anybody who’s been a teacher, and if you now that you want to be the best teacher, you know it takes so much time and effort and energy. So I really wanted to be that best teacher best teacher, you know I had a hundred and sixty five students, but then the wife that I had at the time, it took its toll on the relationship I guess you could say. So we ended up getting divorced mostly because I was so committed to being the best teacher that I could. There’s other reasons mixed in there, but anyways, her and I got divorced and I kind of came to the conclusion that there was no way that I could be the best teacher that I wanted to be and still live the lifestyle that I wanted, which was to have a family, a wife and things of that sort. So right after the divorce I finished out the next school year and then I actually got my 2007 Toyota Tacoma pick-‐up truck and traveled the country, just kind of on a whim, trying to see if there’s anything I could find out there and this is right when the recession happened so basically there were no jobs anywhere. I would send out resumes to every possible place I could imagine and nobody was hiring. I didn’t even get responses back. Sushant: So basically before heading out to travel the country, you basically resigned from your job and that was it. Zeb: Yes, and that was it. So I couldn’t find a job anywhere and I came back home and I moved back in with my parents, which is a very humbling experience. Sushant: One thing that I want to ask because that is a very critical step. A lot of aspiring entrepreneurs out there who may have a job right now, and they may not enjoy the job but they may already know that there is something out there that they’re passionate about and they would like to do. But it is the
http://www.treptalks.com fear that they have of letting go of a stable salary that they are getting bi-‐weekly or monthly. Did you face any of that kind of fear in that moment? What was your thought process? What made you really make the decision “I want to resign and do whatever I want to do?” Zeb: That’s a really good question. Absolutely there was a lot of fear associated with it. I never wanted to be a burden on anyone. I was fortunate enough where my family is very loving and supportive and they would do anything for me, and I know that. I always did have that fall back opportunity. But it absolutely was very scary. But in my heart I knew that I couldn’t live that life and be the type of person that I wanted to be, so I knew that it was just a step that I had to take. Even though it was scary and I knew that it was going to be difficult but I just made that decision regardless. Sushant: So you started traveling and then what happened? Zeb: Okay, so I travelled the country, couldn’t find a job and moved back home, moved back in with my parents. Now as I moved back in with my parents as I said, it was still difficult to find a job even here locally, so I went back to what I knew, which is education. There were a couple of postings on Craigslist, people looking for tutors. I responded to one of them and I went to tutor this one student, and it was just me and this one student and I was going to tutor him for two or three hours a day, and I really enjoyed it because in the classroom I always felt that I was letting students down. With your focus on the kids that are over achieving it’s kind of to the detriment to the kids that are underperforming. And If you focus on the kinds that are underperforming you’re missing out on opportunities to teach the kids who are doing very well. But in this one on one scenario, you can really work to improve that one student and make sure that he becomes successful. Now when I started with him, he was failing all of his classes. He failed all of his classes his freshman year and all of his classes in the first semester of the sophomore year, and that’s when I took over. By his senior year, he was on the honor roll, he had made up all the classes he had failed, and it really was a very fulfilling experience because I had a huge impact on this student’s life and on their whole family. So it was great. And I knew that first semester when I started working with him, I really knew that I wanted to make a business out of it. So I started figuring out ways to book my business. One of the ways that I did that, my sister, she was learning website design classes at the time, so she put together these very rudimentary websites for the Tutoring Solution, and my thought process was that, “Okay I’ve got a website up. Everybody’s going to come and check it out.” But as you know, that didn’t happen. Sushant: With the website, did you want to achieve that people will visit the website and they will see that you are available and they will give you a call and hire you? Or were you trying to do some online education thing? Zeb: That’s a good question. No, I was all local based. At first, I was hoping that people would find my website and then hire me to do tutoring services. So that was the first step and it progressed and I did start to do some online stuff later on. But that was the first basic concept. Sushant: So that was the big problem that you faced at that time. You thought, “I have a website and people will start flocking to the website and I’ll start getting phone calls.” And I think that is a common misconception for any amateur online entrepreneur. They think, “I have a website, I put a blog out
http://www.treptalks.com there, I’m going to write a few blog posts and there will be a lot of people reading it.” I think that’s a humbling experience. Please go ahead. What happened next? Zeb: Yeah, absolutely. And I have come across that now that I’m in Internet marketing, you come across that all the time. Everyone is like, “Oh I have a website out there.” Or a blog, they think that writing a couple blog posts is going to get them tons of traffic and everyone is going to be aware of their business. But that’s just not the case. It takes a lot of work and effort to do that. So we built the website up, fortunately enough for me, and I think this is a critical component, analysis tools. So my sister knew enough to install Google Analytics onto our website. Because you need to know how many people are checking out your website and so I would go and check out the Google Analytics and realize that there were four or five people checking out my website when it first went up, which I knew I needed to change. Sushant: Which is still not bad, but it really depends where those people are coming from. You’re looking for the local people. Zeb: Yeah I was looking for local people, but the four or five people was probably my Mom, my Dad, my brother, my sister. And I had no knowledge of what SEO was or what social media was or any of that stuff. But I knew I had to get people to my website and I had heard, like most people out there, that having a blog up there is going to help your website. So I made a commitment to myself, and I don’t even know why I did it, but just that I was going to write a blog post every single day to try an d increase traffic. Because I kind of came to the conclusion that if I showed up in Chino Hills tutoring or Corona tutoring on Google, that I was going to have people calling me. So that was my main goal. So I wrote a blog post every single day for six months. Sushant: Which year was this? Zeb: Probably 2009 or 2010. Sushant: It’s still pretty late. Zeb: Yeah, I wasn’t an early adopter or anything like that. Sushant: So you started writing blog posts consistently. Zeb: I started writing blog posts consistently and what it really did, which I think a lot of people don’t understand, you want to be the expert in your particular field and so writing a blog post, if you focus on providing valuable content for people, it really educates you in the sense that no other education can. Because you’re doing the research, you’re finding out the information and then you’re applying it into your blog post, which was extremely valuable for me just because when I first started my tutoring business, even though I’d been in education for four years, there’s still a lot of thing I didn’t know and blog writing and social medical definitely had an impact on my knowledge and my understanding of education and how I was able to articulate that to potential customers and the students that I was working with. So we wrote the blog posts every single day and I saw little shifts in traffic, it wasn’t substantial, but I was getting people checking out my website that were not my family or friends. Which
http://www.treptalks.com was kind of cool. And then so I was on Twitter, Facebook and social media, and I knew that if I wasn’t getting people to come to my website because of my blog, maybe I could try to get them through those other avenues. So I built a Facebook page and tried to figure out ways to get that active and I built a Twitter page and I think the thing that helped me out the most was Twitter. The interactions and connections I made on Twitter. It’s kind interesting because I wanted to have, it was just local tutoring. My customer base was local, but the people, the big advantage that I have, the people that I’m connecting with were nowhere near my local area. They were this group on Twitter called Ed Chat. They would meet twice, I think they have two different times on Tuesdays. I’m not sure what it is now but I think it was at 11:00 in the morning and 4:00 in the afternoon, and I would go and engage, and interact with these conversations on Twitter. And basically they would pose educational questions like, “What is the value of homework?” “Should we have homework?” Those type of questions. Sushant: So basically Ed Chat is a tutor chat? Zeb: It’s Twitter chat. Sushant: There are a lot of different chats that happen and they offer a good opportunity to build a community actually online. So you were getting involved in Ed Chat? Zeb: Absolutely. Twitter chats are awesome. I think they are amazing. It really gives you an opportunity to connect with other people, but also I think that one thing that gets missed in social media and all the talk about SEO, but if you make a committed effort towards doing it, Is your knowledge base and your expertise increases exponentially. I always tell people that in the three months I spent in that Ed Chart group, that I learned more about education than I did in my four years of college , my year in the connection program, and my four years in the classroom. It was just so powerful and it really made a difference that impact on what I thought about education. How I was educating children. Sushant: So what happened after that? You got engaged in Ed Chat and you were learning all of these new things, what next? Zeb: Exactly. So then the big concept was I started reaching out to these experts. I started saying, “Hey I really love the thoughts that you are sharing in Ed Chat. I’d love it if you would be willing to write a blog post on my website.” And a couple of them invited me to do the same. Actually the way it started is someone invited me because they liked all the stuff that I was saying. They said, “Hey would you be willing to write a guest post on my blog?” I said, “Yeah, absolutely.” And I did that. And then at the six month mark, I had been writing blog posts every single day so I kind of got tired of it to be honest. So my big plan was, “Okay, I could try to get other people to write these for me.” So I was sending out requests asking people if they would be willing to write guest blogs on my page, and I got a lot of responses from that. And they were all willing to come in and leave these guest posts on my blog, which is really when I saw my tutoring solution shoot up in the search engine rankings putting me at the top of all the local cities that our tutoring service provides tutoring for. Sushant: Now this is the time you’re still living with your parents?
http://www.treptalks.com Zeb: Yes, at this time I was still living with my parents. But it was really exciting. We got the first calls from the people who had found us online. I knew we had visitors, but nobody was really calling us for tutoring services, but right after that big influx of guest posts, I think that it was because those websites had high PR ranks and they were linked into our website, which really boosted our ratings in that sense. So we shot up to the top of the search engine rankings and we were getting calls. It was kind of crazy because for the local tutoring service, we were getting just two or three calls of people who were finding me and were hiring us for our tutoring services, and that stayed pretty steady throughout the entire school year. Sushant: So then your tutoring business flourished at that time. At what point did you decide that you wanted to move out of that and create Welborn Media business? Zeb: So remember the kid that I was telling you about that failed his freshman year? Well his Mom is the owner of Scrapbook Expo. They have Scrapbook Expos all over the United States. They hold these conventions on weekends. Sushant: So Scrapbook Expos for scrapbooking? Zeb: Yeah, so people who are into scrapbooking, they have these locations, like let’s say, they have one in Anaheim, one of their big ones is in Anaheim, so then all these scrapboookers will come and visit the convention. They’ll come in for the weekend, there’s all these events and activities and they can learn about scrapbooking and all of that. So it’s really fun for the people that are involved in scrapbooking. But she was very active in Facebook at the time. And she was really trying to build a strong Facebook presence because scrapbooking is a very visual business and a lot of people who were scrapboookers were jumping not Facebook and using a lot of Facebook. So she was using Facebook a lot and I was telling her about the Ed Chat that I was doing and how cool I thought it was and how I was making all these connections, and she seemed very interred in having that for her business. So then we kind of came to the conclusion, “hey how about I take that over? I’ll run your Twitter account for you for Scrapbook Expo and we’ll see how that works out.” And she was like, “Yeah that sounds like a great idea.” And that one sale was substantially a lot more than if I make a sale in the tutoring business. Sushant: So basically you sold her your Twitter services and she accepted it? Zeb: My Twitter Services, yeah. So that was my first step. And I was kind of like, “Hey I think that would be a good idea.” And I just brought it up to her not thinking that she was going to say anything. And she said, “Yeah, let’s try it.” So that was really cool. And then the light bulb went off and I started approaching other local businesses. I went to he gold course that I had worked at as a kid. I had worked there for seven years and they hired me basically on the spot to run their Facebook page. I did their Facebook, their Twitter and their blog. I reached out to all my friends telling them what I was doing. So within the first couple of weeks, I had sold my social media marketing services to four or five business, and I was making like three times the amount that I was making at the tutoring business. Even though the tutoring business was blowing up, the sales that I was getting on this avenue were substantially larger. So then I have been doing this ever since.
http://www.treptalks.com Sushant: When you started selling your services to all these other businesses, how long before you actually went out and registered your business? Zeb: Before I got my business license? Sushant: You got your first client, the lady, and the light went off in your head that I can do this for other people as well. Did you instantly go out and get your license or did you say, “let me approach a few more people and see what kind of response I’m getting.” Did you register your business before so that you could say, “I’m from Welborn Media, I’m helping this person with their social media, I would like to help you also, and these are the type of results that I can get for you.” Was there a process there? Zeb: I think I started doing the Twitter account in July. And to be honest with you, when I started this entrepreneuriolship journey it wasn’t like I had anything planned or mapped out. I had nothing planned or mapped out. I didn’t know what I was doing and I didn’t even know that I needed a business license. As my business got bigger, you sort of start to figure those things out as it goes along. So I don’t think I actually got a business license until six months later, at the very beginning of the new year was when I applied for my business license and got it. Sushant: Was that in 2010? Zeb: It’s all kind of a blur. I’m pretty sure it was at the beginning of 2010. It might even be 2011. I’m not 100% sure. One of the two. Sushant: And since that time you have grown significantly. Now do you work with businesses or is your customer base much larger than before? Zeb: Our customer base is substantially larger. I have a lot of different avenues that we’re going with the business. This year, we were name the 2013 Chino Business of the Year. And ours is actually the first home based business to win Business of the Year since our current mayor won it back in 2000. He pulled me aside and gave me this long story about how he won it, and how he’s real excited that there’s another home based business like his. So that was very cool. So that’s one avenue which is the local businesses. I think our customer base has expanded, but I think the amount of money that we get from customers has diminished depending on the avenues that we go through. Chino is a suburban area, it’s very well off, but I think in a business sense all the businesses are located in Los Angeles so our local businesses are very small businesses and they can’t afford much in advertising. But my main goal is just to help passionate business owners reach more customers. So if I can do that I know that I am making a substantial impact. And I think with my big problem being a teacher was that a lot of the students just didn’t seem to care. They lacked any kind of passion or motivation to learn. And that’s one thing that I really want to change in the world if I can. Help those students who are struggling to find that motivation and give that to them. And I think that my helping especially passionate business owners, one of the things that I’ve really noticed is if you talk with people who are in careers, like teachers for example, when I was a teacher, most of the teachers, if you go into the teacher’s lounge, they’re complaining about something. They’re complaining about the students, they’re complaining about the administration, they’re just complaining about things in general. Other crews of people that I talk to whenever you ask them about their job, they always kind of bring up the negative as opposed to the
http://www.treptalks.com positive. Whereas I’ve noticed with business owners, it’s the opposite. Most business owners that I talk to, it’s their passion, they’re excite, they love what they do and they want to share that with other people as much as possible. And I think that if I could help more people like that be passionate, that I’m going to help those students that don’t have motivation, cause I’ll have role models to look up to. Sushant: I don’t think that you can start a business and be successful if you don’t have a certain level of passion and commitment towards that. And that’s one thing that I rely on this interview show as well. Because interviews can get pretty boring quickly, but my basic understanding was that entrepreneurs who have gone through the process of starting a business, they understand what it takes to start a business and they’re naturally passionate as you are. So you were initially passionate about education and teaching people, in your current position, are you able to utilize some of those skills? Is there an educational component where you have to educate your client? Zeb: Absolutely. They are definitely intertwined. And I think that this media internet marketing is so perfect for me is because I get to use all my educational skills and I get to use it with a variety of different people. Especially people who are interested in knowing about it, which is very cool. You talk to business owners and everybody says, “You need to be on social media, you need to have a website, you need to have this or that,” but a lot of people, especially small business owners just don’t understand how that connects to their business. And they need somebody to educate them on how it will benefit their business and how or why they should use it. In that aspect of it I definitely use my education skills. Another thing I like to do is giving speaking engagements all the time. So giving these presentations I use a lot of what I’ve learned in front of the classroom. Really they’re the same thing, so I really love it because I’m able to educate people on how they can get more business, make more money and live happier lives. Sushant: So everything came full circle for you? You also run the Defining Success podcast where you ask different successful entrepreneurs about what they know about success. I’m just curious, of all of the interviews that you have done, is there a common theme that you run across? Zeb: They are all passionate. They all love what they do, they’re all excited about it and they all love talking about it. The people that I interview are not all necessarily entrepreneurs. What I want to do is say that it’s okay to live in that career, but you have to love it and you have to love doing it. You can’t be one of those people who’s in their career and they always talk negatively about what they do. You can always say, “I love what I do. I love these aspects of it.” So I have had a lot of educators that have come on the show and people in other industries as well. But the common theme within these people is that they are all passionate about what they do. They’re all very good at it. Giving back is also a big component. I think that they realize that the reasons that they are doing it is not to make money. I always ask the question at the end of every episode on how they define success, without fail, nobody has said anything about money. They’ve probably said, “Success is not money.” And that’s pretty much where it goes. So it’s never financial in terms of what these people consider successful is if they are making a positive impact on the world and making a difference in a positive way. I think that all of the people that have been on my podcast have done that. I think that they are doing great work and that’s why I want to high light them on the podcast.
http://www.treptalks.com Sushant: I think that that’s a very important point for entrepreneurs to know, if you’re starting a business with the sole intention of making money, I think it will be difficult because you will do things that…to have a market or to have a community, you have to be providing some sort of value. And if you’re coming from a place where you’re helping people, that is a powerful thing to bring people to you. And at that point, money becomes a side effect I guess. Zeb: It totally is a side effect. I was at a conference last week and one of the presenters said something like, “How do you make a million dollars? Help everybody around you make a billion dollars.” And it’s true. If you’re out there willing to help other people, the results are going to come back to you tenfold. Sushant: What is the one thing in your last two or three years of experience, what is the one thing that you have learned that people need to do in general? You were talking about consistency before. Is there a theme that would make people more successful in their social media efforts or digital marketing efforts? I know there are a lot of tips, tricks and tactics, but as a general strategy, is there one thing that works really well? Zeb: Basically, when I started my business the goal was to make money, that’s what I thought the goal was and that is what I really tried to do. So if you have that mindset, it’s going to show in the way that you do things, and people don’t connect with that. People are not interested in doing business with people who are only interested in making money. People are interested in doing business because they feel that they are generally being helped by this person. And I learned that fairly quickly. Whenever I have given myself in terms that I want to help and I want to show you how you can use this and it’s going to help you, I think in terms of general strategy for social media, there’s like the stages of social media. Warren Whitlock, he was a guest on the Defining Success podcast, he says there’s three stages that go through social media. The first stage is how the heck am I going to use this? What do I care what other people have for breakfast fr dinner, and that’s what a lot of people think social media is people posting their dinner. The second stage is, you jump on it and you r whole goal is to try to sell. So every post that you put out there is buy this, buy that, do this, do that, and there’s no authentic engagement going on with people. And the third stage is how did I ever live without this? The strategy should always be to make genuine authentic connections with people who are passionate and interested in the same things that you are. So I think that is what I try to get across in all of my social media strategies is that I try to connect with the people that are involved with the business and that like the same things that they would like and try to build connections and build relationships with those people. What your goal should be if you are running a business and you’re trying to reach more customers, is to find a way to get your customers excited about their business. Not just excited, but involved so that they are engaging on your Facebook page, they’re interacting on your Twitter page, they’re making interactions, and they’re talking about your business. If they are talking about your business online, they’re going to be talking about it offline. And then you want to bring those people in too. Get more people closer and closer to your business, make them feel like they are a part of your business, make them feel like they know you, trust you and like you, because those are the people that people do business with. Sushant: And that will only happen if you take the time to create contacts and conversations with people. It’s not just going to happen by sending out links that lead to your website. You have to create
http://www.treptalks.com conversation. That’s a very good point. If someone wants to reach out to you for your social media services, get some advice, or anything like that, what is the best way to reach you? Zeb: I’m pretty much open in any platform. My name is Zeb Welborn, my email address
[email protected], Twitter Zebwelborn, if you’re interested in the Defining Success podcast, it’s on iTunes. Feel free to contact me. Sushant: I will mention all of those addresses in my show notes. I appreciate. I definitely learned a lot of things. In a 30-‐40 minute interview, you can’t really talk about too many tactics, but I think that in life and with success, there’s a huge component that goes with the mindset. And If you get the mindset correct the techniques will work so much better. And I thin that you have definitely given good mindset advice to my viewers and myself. Thank you very much. Zeb: Let me add one more thing on that. The mindset thing makes all the difference in the world. If you go in with the mindset of helping out other people, other people can see that and I can’t tell you how many people come up to me on a regular basis and say, “You know, I see something in you, there’s something special in you,” and it’s really just the mindset of going out there and offering up your help and services in any way that you can. Thank you Sushant for having me on. I really appreciate it, and I had a great time talking with you today. Sushant: The pleasure was all mine. End Audio 0:34:44
