Stephen Woessner is a digital marketing authority, entrepreneur, speaker, educator, and bestselling author two books, The Small Business Owner’s Handbook to Search Engine Optimization and Increase Online Sales through Viral Social Networking.
Clients include Cisco, Advisors Excel, Agency Management Institute, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and others. Linda Fassig-Knauer, US Channels, and more. His digital marketing insights have been featured in Inc. Magazine, Forbes, Entrepreneur, and The Washington Post.
Can you share your backstory with our readers?
I come from a long line of entrepreneurs. My family immigrated to the United States from Turkey and Greece and slugged it out in the restaurant business -- despite the odds. I grew up in the business, too. When I graduated from high school, I served four years in the United States Air Force working in nuclear missile silos in the prairies of South Dakota. It was there that I learned during several high pressure situations how much I loved troubleshooting and problem solving -- key skills that I use every day leading Predictive ROI.
Predictive is my fifth company, and before starting it, I served nearly six years in academia within the University of Wisconsin System teaching business owners and executives through the UW campuses including the UW-Madison School of Business. I am the author of three bestselling books with the latest being, Profitable Podcasting, which became a #1 New Release on Amazon.com in less than 18-hours of being released.
How did you start Predictive ROI? How does Onward Nation tie into your main business?
When my first book, The Small Business Owner's Handbook to Search Engine Optimization, was published, I started receiving some consulting opportunities. Initially, I declined but then they became more and more interesting so I accepted. And the work was a ton of fun. So it began to build and Predictive ROI was born. Our roots are deep in SEO, content development, and now how a podcast can drive the content strategy for an entire company as well as lead and sales generation through what we call the Trojan Horse of Sales.
Onward Nation is our daily podcast and it gives us the opportunity to interview today's top business owners to better understand and learn how they think, act, and achieve. We now have listeners in 115 countries and nearly 50,000 email subscribers. From a business development perspective...my Predictive ROI team ends up working with 10-20 of our guests per year in helping them put a Trojan Horse of Sales out in front of their company, too. And that is how Onward Nation drives business development for Predictive.
What's been your biggest challenge in business?
In my opinion, our biggest challenge -- and one of the biggest challenges for most business owners -- is remaining focused on building and scaling the core business. There is so much distraction, and to be candid -- it's more marketing hyperbole than anything, around creating courses and other get rich quick schemes floating around today from so-called experts.
Can courses drive revenue? Of course...but where that becomes dangerous...is when a business owner takes their eye off their core business, their team, etc. to spend time on creating a passive income model. And in the meantime, the core business suffers from the lack of attention on making sure the sales pipeline remains full and robust.
What's been the most valuable piece of advice you've ever been given?
"Don't ever quit." And it was a lesson I learned from my grandfather, Peter Maronitis. In fact...I shared some of his story during an Onward Nation episode here: http://onwardnation.com/stephen-woessner-solocast-episode-29/
What's your best piece of advice for established entrepreneurs looking to scale?
Take the time to actually map out your vision for what the next level of scaling looks like. We are big fans of the Entrepreneur Operating System found in the book, Traction. My leadership team and I have worked through the V/TO, mapped out our 3-year and 10-year visions and then meet every Wednesday morning for our 90-minute Level 10 meetings. This type of discipline and focused effort toward what we are trying to build and scale makes the results possible. Without this level of discipline, it has been my experience, that business owners tend to aimlessly wander through the wilderness and that makes scaling nearly impossible.
What other projects do you have in the pipeline?
Goodness...there is a lot coming down the pipeline for Predictive ROI. Smiling! We are getting ready to roll out a newly revised version of our Trojan Horse of Sales System, where we help business owners create cornerstone content each week so they can connect with their top prospects -- without their prospects feeling like a prospect. The system has driven significant financial ROI for our clients and we continue to make it better and better. It has evolved into a comprehensive turnkey content marketing, lead, and sales generation system for our clients.
How can our readers connect with you?
The best places for readers to find me would be on LinkedIn at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephenwoessner/ or at OnwardNation.com. My email address is stephen@predictiveroi.com and I read and reply to every single email -- no fancy filling or automated system.