RG 223 – Business 101: The True Value of Perseverance w/ Bill Bice

Bill is the CEO of Boom Time and he’s a serial entrepreneur. Bill found that the toughest thing when creating a business is launching a product to market and he was especially frustrated with marketing, so he decided to tackle the problem head on. He is a programmer and so he created Boom Time and tackled the marketing of tech projects. Bill made his first dollar mowing lawns at 10 years old.

While Bill was at school he used to jump over the back wall and work with a local family who owned a business in a strip mall so he saw entrepreneurship head on. He started a software company at 18 when he thought he could do anything but in retrospect he realises that it takes a long time to know how to run a company. Now he does a log to start up investment but he doesn’t like to invest in first time entrepreneurs, he wants to see people who’ve tried and failed.

Marketing is such a frustrating part of every business because he evades systematising and it needs transparency. He specialises in high end B2B because you can be great in these markets with only 3 channels – the website, email and linkedin – by capturing every lead that comes in and staying in front of them via and email list. Most Ceos won’t have the time togged outside of their business to be creating thought leadership content – you either love it and do it or you hate it and avoid it. However, these CEOs have valuable knowledge that should be shared. The only way to get them going it is to have a copywriter as an outside resource. You need someone who knows your audience inside and out and has come up through your audience. Bill’s company spends an hour with CEOs and will come up with 6 months work of content, they know the subject matter and the experts who can write it and then they work through automating it across the channels.

The most common mistake during a recession is to pull back from marketing so it’s much easier to make an impression during a recession. Recession makes strong companies and the smaller ones die out and the strong ones become aggressive. The page on a website that gets the most visits is the ‘about us’ page so small businesses should make the most of this. You can see who they are and who’s behind the boss. During a slow down, like the one during Covid, learn from the Chinese companies that have already been through this – the decline is steep but hopefully the recovery will be as well. We just need to focus on whats going to happen afterwards.

Top tips

• Most important habit – meditate
• Most influential person – Bill Gates, Steve Jobs
• Most important tool – analytics
• Contact – LinkedIn
• ceo@boomtime.com
• b2b word of mouth podcast