Ray Blakney is an esteemed entrepreneur who has founded an array of über-successful businesses, including Podcast Hawk (a SaaS product that helps people get booked on podcasts) and Live Lingua, a renowned online language learning platform. An award-winning Filipino-American entrepreneur, speaker, and podcaster, Ray builds and helps others build 6- and 7-figure businesses on a bootstrap budget using SEO.
Home Business Magazine had the chance to catch up with Ray and get his top tips for entrepreneurial success. His advice is sure to help all business owners grow their ventures and reach higher levels of success in 2021 and beyond.
HBM: What are the top traits that an entrepreneur needs to be successful?
RB: “There is one characteristic, above all others, that all entrepreneurs need to be successful: discipline. It’s the ability to wake up every morning and do what you said you are going to do that day, and do that every day. This will help entrepreneurs stay on top of the tasks that they need to complete each day.
Another skill that is needed to be a successful entrepreneur is the ability to get comfortable with being uncomfortable. My mentor told me that entrepreneurship is about constantly growing and learning, and for the most part that is uncomfortable. That advice has helped me survive previous pandemics that affected my business and this current one. This will also help new entrepreneurs successfully grow into their role.”
HBM: What is your top tip for growing a new business?
RB: “To increase conversion rates, it is essential to A/B test faster than all your competitors. Constantly be testing and improving every step of your sales funnel. Test and tweak your marketing emails to improve open and click-through rates. In addition, your call center scripts should be tweaked constantly to see if you could raise the conversion by even a fraction of a percent. The faster you can test, the faster you will find the best results, and the faster your business will grow.”
HBM: How can entrepreneurs be more productive each day?
RB: “It is so important to work on one thing until completion before starting something else. It does not matter how big or small. Don’t stop answering an email to check a text message. Don’t stop working on your report to just ‘hop on Facebook for one minute’ (which always ends up being 30 minutes). Don’t start a new business when your current one is starting to do well.”
HBM: How can home-based business owners work better with their remote employees?
RB: “Effective internal communication is vital for remote teams, because it helps them connect and collaborate better. One of the key ways we help facilitate workplace communication is by providing channels for staff to have non-work related conversations. This may be counter-intuitive, but by creating these channels (special forums, Slack channels, virtual pizza nights, etc.), we have found that people feel more comfortable around each other. That means they are not just co-workers but also friends. As a result, the work communication becomes much smoother across our company.”
HBM: What is one book that all business owners should read?
RB: “One book that I highly recommend is The Lean Startup, written by Eric Ries. I regularly re-read this book, as it contains fantastic lessons. This book teaches readers to launch a minimum viable product as soon as possible, and then improve based on user feedback. Many business owners, including myself, always get caught up in striving to create the ‘perfect’ product offering before releasing it and then discover that nobody uses most aspects of what we built.”
You can reach Ray Blakney at PodcastHawk.com, LiveLingua.com, and on LinkedIn.
