The Accidental Solopreneur: A 6 Step Playbook w/Author Dennis Geelen

Brett Trainor (00:00.694)
Hey, Dennis, welcome to the podcast.

Dennis Geelen (00:03.565)
Hey, thanks a lot for having me, Brett.

Brett Trainor (00:05.634)
Now it's my pleasure. I've been looking forward to this and I appreciate the flexibility in the schedule. I hit you last minute, so it's always appreciated. But the accidental solopreneur, I wanna keep saying entrepreneur, but solopreneur, got my attention early. I've read your book by the same name and I love parables. I forgot how much I actually enjoyed that type of writing. So super excited to have you on the podcast. So to start, maybe just give...

the folks in the audience a little bit about, you know, kind of what you're working on today and maybe a little bit about your background and then we'll get into the heart of the matter.

Dennis Geelen (00:40.197)
Sure. Yeah. So I'd say it's morphed a little bit over the last little while. I became a solopreneur about five years ago and we can, we can dive into how that happened a bit later, but I started off doing management consulting, um, leadership, organizational health, um, customer centricity and innovation. We're kind of the main things that I worked on. I still do that, but less of it these days because the more that

one person consulting business became successful. The more people started knocking on my door saying, hey, I wanna do what you're doing. Can I pick your brain for a bit? So now I spent a lot of time actually coaching other solopreneurs to do what I'm kind of doing as I'm on the side now, which is my own one person consulting business.

Brett Trainor (01:29.958)
Yeah, that's awesome. And talk maybe a little bit about the two books because I love when you introduce yourself and say author of four, proud of two, and I'm paraphrasing a little bit. Or as you say, two of them are pretty good, which I would I'd agree with. I haven't read the other two, so I'm not judging the other two. But I love that.

Dennis Geelen (01:39.158)
Yeah.

Dennis Geelen (01:44.073)
Yeah. When, when I first was starting out as a one person consulting business, I had no idea how to brand market, sell like I just knew what to do once I landed a client, right? I did, I didn't know how to get a client. Um, so one, I was, you know, learning quite a bit and trying to figure that out. And one of the, the pieces of wisdom I kept hearing was you need to have a good book behind your name. If you're a consultant or coach,

have your own framework, have your own book that talks about it. And now that's going to differentiate you and that's going to make you be seen more as a credible expert. So I had no idea how to write a book. So I sat down, I wrote two really quickly. They weren't great. I didn't use an editor. I didn't use a publisher. I did my own graphics. It was really more just, Hey, what's this like? Um, kind of got a feel for it. Sold a few of the books. Um, some people like them. Um,

But then when the pandemic hit, it was okay, now I'm gonna sit down and really take this seriously. I've got more time on my hands now. A bunch of my consulting had been put on hold or canceled altogether. So I chatted with a bunch of bestselling authors. I absorbed as much as I could about the writing and editing and publishing and marketing process. And that's when I put out the zero in formula. And that's the one that goes into, here's my...

methodology behind making your business as customer centric and innovative as possible. And I hired a good editor. I hired a good graphics team. I still did the self-publishing route. That was basically what I was being told even from some well-known published authors. It was, hey, you're better off just to self-publish these days and do your own marketing. So I did that and the book took off. So that was great. And then like I said, lots of people were knocking on my door saying, hey,

I want to do what you're doing. And I had so many of those calls where people were picking my brain that I thought, Hey, I got a whole other market here. So that's when I sat down and wrote the accidental solopreneur. And as you mentioned, it's this one's a parable. The zero in formula was more of a traditional nonfiction business book. This time I said, Hey, I want to challenge myself to write a different style book. Love Patrick Linciani and his books where he puts it into a parable. I'm going to try that.

Dennis Geelen (04:09.069)
So I hired myself a fiction editor this time to help me with that. Still a business book, still all kinds of tips and strategies in it, but it's a story and there's tension and there's characters. And so that was, that was fun. Um, so both of those books have been instrumental in getting me clients. I get consulting clients from business leaders who read the zero in formula. I get coaching clients from people who want to start up their own one person business because they've read

the accidental solopreneur. And the next step is they reach out to me, they either buy my course, or they do some coaching or consulting with me.

Brett Trainor (04:45.39)
Yeah, that's awesome. And again, I think what we'll do is let's take the story, right? The book that you wrote because again, reading it, and I've been out of corporate for four years when I read it, but I kind of shivered looking back at the journey and those meetings and the, you know, the crossroads and, you know, I posted something not too long ago that we actually, you know, in corporate, we design our lives around our corporate jobs and you're just watching this unfold in real time with your, your two characters.

Dennis Geelen (05:03.156)
Yeah.

Dennis Geelen (05:09.601)
Yes.

Brett Trainor (05:15.082)
And couldn't help but think that how much, you know, I'd love for you. And when I get folks that escaped corporate to, to share a little bit about your journey, it's not like one day you woke up, said, I'm going to write a book and start consulting and while I, you've got the instant success. So, you know, I'd love for you just to dig in a little bit. Um, what got you to that crossroads? And again, you don't have to go super deep in that, but something pushed you to the point of say, I'm going solo. And what did you do to get started?

Dennis Geelen (05:32.581)
Yeah.

Dennis Geelen (05:37.711)
Yep.

Yep.

Dennis Geelen (05:44.757)
Yeah, I would say I was pushed. For me, it was a layoff, right? And I often tell people I didn't think I had an entrepreneurial bone in my body before that. Looking back now, I really wish I had started earlier as a side hustle because all of a sudden I was knee deep into it. I had this decision. Do I jump back into another corporate job? You know, this, this path that I thought was safe and comfortable.

Brett Trainor (05:49.475)
Okay.

Dennis Geelen (06:13.097)
Suddenly I was laid off and didn't feel so safe and comfortable anymore. But I was addicted to that two week paycheck, the, you know, the benefits and, you know, um, but I had this cushion. I was lucky enough to have a pretty good severance package and, uh, my wife encouraged me to say, Hey, you know, you've, you've always been.

Brett Trainor (06:20.883)
Yes. Yeah.

Dennis Geelen (06:36.377)
really good at workshops, public speaking. You always love it when you guys bring in consultants and you do a bunch of collaborative stuff. I think you'd make a really good consultant. And at first I was kind of like, yeah, but that seems a bit risky, right? Yeah, but the more I thought about it, the more I was kind of in love with the idea. And then my wife said, okay, if you're going to do this, I want you to give it a full year. Don't dabble, don't quit after two months.

Brett Trainor (06:51.731)
Yeah, yeah.

Dennis Geelen (07:05.577)
We're fine. I had my severance package. My wife had a good job. We were gonna be fine financially. If I gave this a whole year and didn't even get a client, we'd be fine. And then I could go back and look for another corporate job if I wanted. And she said, if you give it a full year and it doesn't work, you won't have any regrets. You won't be like, oh, I wish I had a tried because you know you gave it your all. But if it works.

man, you're gonna be so proud of yourself. You're gonna love that. And I gotta tell you, there was many times in that first year where I felt like quitting. Like I said, I had no idea what I was doing. I hadn't done this before. I had never built a personal brand or marketed or packaged. So I had a ton to learn, but eventually momentum started to pick up. I started to get some clients. I kept learning. And next thing I know, people knocking on my door asking to learn from me. And I thought, okay, wow, this is actually...

working. I can do this and boy the time flexibility that comes with the time freedom. Yeah it's and I'm so thankful that my wife encouraged me to go down the road.

Brett Trainor (08:14.002)
Yeah. And I think it's so many good points early on there too, that I think, and again, I encourage folks to is you got to have this support network to do this, right? If you're fighting against, you know, partners, spouse, family, friend, whatever it is, it's going to make it even more difficult to do this. And two is yes, even if you're going to do a side hustle or you're going to do it, don't half ass it, man. Give it, give it a work hard at it and make it work.

Dennis Geelen (08:26.381)
Yeah.

Brett Trainor (08:38.374)
And to your point that you can always go back to corporate. It's, it's there waiting for you, right. You can go through that grind, find the new thing, but getting that to that flexibility, cause when I left, it was, I want the financial freedom, right. The independence from the paycheck or just working on the paycheck. I can control my own, man. It wasn't until later that I realized is the freedom, the flexibility and the scheduling and who I'm working with and how I structure my day, I didn't realize how important that was.

Dennis Geelen (08:38.551)
Yep.

Dennis Geelen (08:43.182)
Yep.

Dennis Geelen (08:57.603)
Yep.

Dennis Geelen (09:04.174)
Yep.

Dennis Geelen (09:07.502)
Yeah.

Brett Trainor (09:08.298)
until much later, but again, better late than never.

Dennis Geelen (09:11.297)
Yeah. And, and, and maybe it was the same for you. Uh, at first it was a huge shock to my system because I mean the time flexibility at first I was so used to having, here's what I'm doing this week, you know, in your corporate job, it's here's the meetings you go to on Monday. Here's the reports that are due on Tuesday. Here's, you know, what you need to do on Thursday. And it was all structured. And you know, you knew what you were doing every day, nine to five. Suddenly I had a clean slate.

Brett Trainor (09:25.869)
Yeah.

Dennis Geelen (09:41.197)
which is a little bit liberating in the beginning, but then it's like, Holy smokes, I have to fill this time. I have to do this well. I need to understand what's most important. I have to design my days. So that was a huge transition for me. And it took a while. Now I'm at the point where, Oh, imagine going back to the other one. That would be a just as bad, if not a worst transition, trying to go back to that. Right? So

Brett Trainor (09:46.573)
Thank you.

Brett Trainor (10:05.802)
Yeah, for sure. No, it's right. It was a and I tell people it's going to take a little bit of time. And part of it is the appeal is the flexibility. But what I tell people, I mean, you're better off being structured to get your work done in shorter amounts of time and be super organized, then that gives you a bunch of additional freedom. So it's kind of intuitive to sometimes just say, What do you mean, I got to be structured to be free? I'm like, well,

Dennis Geelen (10:20.899)
Yeah.

Brett Trainor (10:31.394)
Trust me, once you get there and you figure out how to get the work done in a set amount of time and it gives you more flexibility, it'll pay off. So maybe one, yeah, exactly right. And the other thing you mentioned, it is take the action, right? I mean, I don't know if there's any stats and folks that everybody that thinks, yeah, I can do that, I can do that, but the people that actually will, you know, it's probably less than 10%. And so there's just an advantage to people who do.

Dennis Geelen (10:34.439)
Yeah.

Dennis Geelen (10:38.389)
Yeah, when you know, you know.

Brett Trainor (11:01.23)
Just go do it and it's okay if you make mistakes. Because I think that was the other thing I had to unlearn from corporate is it's very, not maybe not rewarding isn't the right word, but there's small incremental improvements, right? Don't rock the boat. Don't go outside the lines. I don't want to have to justify something over here. No big ideas, blah, blah. Then all of a sudden now you've got to get beyond that incremental thing.

Dennis Geelen (11:21.335)
Yeah.

Brett Trainor (11:30.006)
bigger, think differently than what you had. So that took a little bit to break 30 years of structure to say, Hey, it's okay. I mean, I look at what you've done with the books, the newsletter, you've got the courses, you've got the coaching and consulting, you know, probably 10 years ago, five years ago, that wasn't even on your radar. But you were open minded enough to say, Hey, where's the market taking me? Where are the opportunities? And what do people want?

Dennis Geelen (11:34.014)
Yeah

Dennis Geelen (11:38.135)
Yeah.

Dennis Geelen (11:53.833)
Yeah. Yep.

Brett Trainor (11:58.998)
So that's what gets me so excited about the future of this. And when I, again, I tell people just get out, focus on one thing like you did, the consulting, this is what I know. This is how I do it, build it, and then start to look around. Once you get the momentum and then take advantage of the opportunities. But the one question I do want to ask you, and I ask everybody that comes on is how did you, where did that, the first customer come from, right? Was it somebody in your network? Is it a, was it a referral partner? What was kind of.

what worked for you in the early days and what changed. And now you've obviously got a network you can rely on, but in the early days, what was working for you?

Dennis Geelen (12:32.086)
Yeah.

Dennis Geelen (12:37.985)
Yeah. In the beginning it was, it was a, my existing network, which was also not as easy as you might think because everybody knew me as corporate dentist in a particular role. Right. Now they have to see you in this new role as a consultant for a specific niche. And if they can't make that connection, they may not, you know, want to hire you. But luckily I was able to get a few.

Brett Trainor (13:00.758)
Right.

Dennis Geelen (13:04.377)
clients through my existing network. And then it was through very deliberate physical networking. I was going to different networking events. I was networking with different businesses and people in my area.

And then that started to create some more opportunities. And then from there you start to get referrals and then it starts to snowball. And then eventually if you build, um, you know, a bit of a presence online, you'll get through some through that. But that's more of a longer term play. I found like, you're not going to start posting on social media and then, you know, the next week you're getting clients out of it. This is a, that's more of a longterm play. So.

Brett Trainor (13:46.102)
Yeah, and two, I think that's a great point. John Arms, one of my fractional buddies, tells he likes to use the term, it's micro marketing, right? As we're exiting corporate and looking, again, if we're just looking to replace income, maybe double income.

You don't have to, you don't have to have paid LinkedIn ads and build an elaborate website. It is just, as you say, the networking can get you there. It's then where do you want to go after that? That's why I always ask people, you may not know where you want to go, but it helps to define it then rethink when you get to certain points because. Right. They don't have to take your path and do all these things. I find it exciting. I'm kind of heading down that path with a little different twist to it. But again, I know other folks that, Hey, I just want to.

Dennis Geelen (14:08.355)
Yep.

Exactly.

Dennis Geelen (14:17.735)
Yep.

Brett Trainor (14:29.526)
Right. One or two clients, you do this for another five years and I'm out of here. I just don't want to be in corporate. So, um, no, I think the network is important. And you're right. I think that goes back to, um, one thing you said where we were all known as the corporate version of ourselves, but having that one thing that you're focusing on, it makes it a little more difficult because some folks won't, as you say, connect with that.

Dennis Geelen (14:35.95)
Yep.

Brett Trainor (14:54.53)
but it makes it easier for other folks to say, oh, I know that Dennis, this is what he's actually working on. Let me connect you with him now, where if you had gone in and say, hey, I can do all these things, I found people will never be able to pinpoint it back because they don't remember you as that person. So again, back to the counterintuitive that, man, the more I niche down, the more I miss opportunities. I don't know, it's actually the other way, the opportunity to find you if you get a little more specific, so.

Dennis Geelen (14:59.822)
Yeah.

Dennis Geelen (15:08.705)
Yeah.

Dennis Geelen (15:18.469)
Yeah. I like to say, you know, what is the very specific problem that you solve for a specific group of people? And that problem has to be big enough that they're willing to pay to have it fixed, right? But if you're just a jack of all trades, hey, I'm a consultant. What do you need? Well, you're not going to appeal to anybody, right? It's like, I solve this problem for this group of people. Oh, I'm that group of people. I have that problem. You must be the expert.

Brett Trainor (15:24.835)
Yes.

Brett Trainor (15:31.848)
Exactly.

Brett Trainor (15:36.213)
Right.

Dennis Geelen (15:45.313)
You're not just a jack of all trades. You're the guy that solves that problem. I need you. So it does seem counterintuitive like, boy am I cutting out a bunch of potential clients here. No, they were never gonna be clients because you don't appeal to them and you don't say that you solved their problems.

Brett Trainor (15:51.298)
Exactly.

Brett Trainor (15:58.611)
Exactly.

Brett Trainor (16:03.042)
And then the universe of clients is so big. If you look on LinkedIn, I forget what the number is. 900 million, maybe it's something like that. That it's, again, the beauty of it is most of us aren't looking for maybe 10 clients who we need over the course of a couple or three or four years, right? To really hit the initial goals. And then you can build from there. So awesome. All right, the other one thing, not one thing, we could probably talk for a couple hours.

Dennis Geelen (16:09.505)
Yeah, it's crazy.

Dennis Geelen (16:19.362)
Yeah.

Brett Trainor (16:29.046)
But what I liked, you kind of, you told the parable, but then gave a solution of, hey, here's how you can, if this sounds like you, which you did a really good job of, here's kind of a six step playbook to help you think through it. Cause I know a lot of the folks, when I talk to them in corporate, they're like, man, how do I get started? How do I think about, there's so many things that I need to do. And I thought you did a nice job of just laying out, hey, a little six steps. So if you don't mind, can we break those down?

Dennis Geelen (16:51.137)
Right.

Dennis Geelen (16:58.201)
Sure, yeah. And I tell people, this is what worked for me. It may or may not be the exact same six steps that worked for you, but anytime you're gleaning something from somebody, apply what worked for them and see what can work for you and maybe throw away the stuff that doesn't. Because like you said, everybody's on a bit of a different path, right? But for me, and this was not a roadmap that I came up with and said, this is what I'm gonna follow. This is a roadmap I came up with afterwards and went, oh.

Brett Trainor (17:17.398)
Yes.

Dennis Geelen (17:26.029)
here's the six things that worked. I'm gonna throw away the hundred things I tried that didn't work. Let me distill it down to the things that did, right? So the first thing which we already talked about was be the expert, right? How do you build credibility for being the person that solves a specific problem for a specific group of people, right? So first you have to figure that out and that could be a combination of what do I like to do? Where is there a market?

What do I have the skill sets to do for where is there a big enough pain point? So, you know, there's, there's a bit of a process there. And for me it was trial and error. I tried a bunch of different things and okay, that's resonating, but I don't really enjoy doing that. Okay. I really enjoy this, but there's no market for it. And then eventually, you know, you land on, ah, that's my, that's my thing I want to be known for. And for me, it was start with offering that as a service. So consulting.

Right? Sounds great to have a book or a course out there, but if you start there, A, you probably don't have an audience yet, and you need a big audience to sell books and courses. That comes later. In my playbook, that's later, right? Start with offering a service, because you're going to learn so much. When you're working with clients, whether coaching, consulting, freelancing, whatever, you're going to find, what are the questions they keep asking? What are the answers I keep giving?

Brett Trainor (18:35.401)
Right.

Dennis Geelen (18:52.901)
How am I distilling this down into my own proprietary framework, right? So that's step two. What is your proprietary method or system or way of doing it? Because different is better than better, I tell people. Right? Yeah.

Brett Trainor (19:09.758)
100% of the time, yeah, because it's really hard to prove better, right? To your point, you can't and people just got, eh, roll your eyes. Or if it's pricing, then it's a race to the bottom and you want to avoid that. So different is so important. And the one thing maybe we can touch on is I get pushed back from folks. Well, I haven't had customers yet. So how do I get credibility? I said, man, you've been doing in corporate for 30 years, right? Either internal customers, external customers.

Dennis Geelen (19:16.206)
Yep.

Dennis Geelen (19:23.343)
Yeah.

Dennis Geelen (19:34.884)
Yes.

Brett Trainor (19:37.278)
You've got a process for doing what you do because there's very few companies I've seen that have so many processes just to find you come in and just turn things on and get out of, no, you know, for years you've been working on things. So whatever you've learned, there's companies out there that need that help right in a different capacity. So it doesn't have to be customers to get that credibility. It could be what you've been doing, right?

Dennis Geelen (19:40.034)
Yeah.

Dennis Geelen (19:56.364)
Yeah.

Yep. But testimonials are gold, right? Like get them. It's social proof that you've done this before. So like you said, can you leverage somebody from your past in your corporate environment that's going to write a quick testimonial? Hey, Dennis did this for us. Nobody needs to know what was in a corporate environment or in a different setting, but it shows you did this for somebody else. And especially if that testimonial talks about the results you get, right?

Cause a testimony that just says, Hey, Dennis is awesome. Highly recommend at the end of the day, that really says nothing. And people are going to read through that and go, that sounds like a friend or a family wrote that. Right. But if it's, Hey, we brought Dennis in and here's why, and here's the results we got. Ah, now that sounds like this person is credible. They do get the results. And at the end of the day, that's what people are buying. They're buying the results.

Brett Trainor (20:33.674)
Right.

Brett Trainor (20:41.64)
Right.

Brett Trainor (20:56.49)
Yeah, it's such a good point. I didn't even thought about that back from the corporate experience. Again, if you know, my audience that 20 to 30 years there, you probably worked for a supervisor or a boss or a different company where you implemented something or did something that, you know, you still got a relationship go at and ask them to say, Hey, you know, would you mind saying, yeah, when we did this, you know, Brett took care of this, I didn't have to worry. Boom. Next thing you know, I didn't even think about that, but that's, there's no reason why you couldn't do that from a test. Interesting.

Dennis Geelen (21:02.287)
Yeah.

Dennis Geelen (21:11.522)
Yeah.

Dennis Geelen (21:20.693)
Yeah. The other thing I advise people is, um, when you're first starting out, okay, you need, maybe you don't have testimonials from a previous corporate experience, but you need testimonials to get new clients. It's kind of this chicken and egg thing, right? Well, how do I get clients to give me a testimonial if I don't have testimonials that are gonna make clients, right? So one thing I advise is handpicked four or five.

Brett Trainor (21:39.264)
Right.

Dennis Geelen (21:50.297)
people, corporations, whatever you want to work for and offer to do something either free or highly discounted in exchange for, Hey, if, if I do a good job, all I want is a testimonial of this, right? Yes, it's, you're not going to be making money off the bat, but testimonials are gold. So if you handpicked the right four or five people, organizations, whatever, and you get a testimonial from them, now imagine those four or five testimonials are

Brett Trainor (22:03.135)
Yeah, makes sense.

Dennis Geelen (22:16.965)
sitting on your website or sitting in your sales material or sitting on your LinkedIn profile and every time somebody's considering you as the expert to bring in you've got four or five testimonials from reputable people saying here's the results that Dennis or Brett or whoever got for me that's huge so don't be afraid to do those free or just highly discounted just to get those testimonials and get yourself rolling and build that credibility.

Brett Trainor (22:34.935)
Yeah, such a good point.

Brett Trainor (22:42.422)
Yeah, that's awesome. Definitely started that a couple of seconds, I could do a better job of that myself. So it's one of my to do list for the rest of the week. Alright, so now and I do agree with you, I hate to give away stuff, but as long as you get in some value in exchange, which a testimonial would give you, there's absolutely value to that, especially when you're just getting started. So alright, number three is

Dennis Geelen (22:50.477)
Yeah.

Dennis Geelen (22:59.745)
Yeah. And I wouldn't suggest doing this all the time, but if you're just starting some, like I'll, I'll do it when I'm, when I'm offering a new course, I'll offer the course to a couple of people for free in exchange for the testimonial before I even launched the course. Now, when I launch it, it's got a bunch of testimonials already. And I'm like, great.

Brett Trainor (23:19.118)
Bill built in. Yeah. Perfect. Smart, right? It's work smarter, not harder is what we're after here. Still makes sense. So, all right, number three, you've got refine the offer. And I still, I find folks, you know, I spent a lot of time with folks trying to come up with what, what the offer is because they've never had to price it before. And I would say 90% of the time it's underpriced or undervalued for what they're actually doing. So what's, what's your advice around the offer? So creation and then refinement. How do you, how do you?

Dennis Geelen (23:25.088)
Yeah.

Dennis Geelen (23:30.082)
Yes.

Dennis Geelen (23:36.694)
Yeah.

Dennis Geelen (23:41.401)
Yeah.

Dennis Geelen (23:46.305)
Yeah. The first thing I advise people is come up with your own proprietary system or methodology or process or whatever. People are going to buy that and the results it gets not you necessarily, right? You're a dime a dozen. There's all kinds of freelancers, coaches, consultants out there. As soon as you can come up with something that's proprietary or different

Brett Trainor (23:48.685)
this.

Dennis Geelen (24:13.005)
or repackaged in a certain way. Now you're selling that. You don't have to sell yourself. It's, Hey, buy this system, buy this four step methodology by and give it a name and now sell it at a fixed price rather than selling your time. Right? When I first started out in consulting, it was, here's, here's the type of consulting I do and here's how much I charge per hour. And it was a hard time getting clients until I learned,

Brett Trainor (24:29.879)
Yeah.

Dennis Geelen (24:41.409)
Here's the package or the system or the methodology I take your team through. Here's the results you get out of it. And here's the price tag for it. All of a sudden that was a lot more attractive and it wasn't because people didn't want me it's they needed to know what they were getting and how is it packaged and they wanted to know what's the final price. So set a fixed price around it and don't be afraid to make it a little higher price than you think, right? Um, you don't want to be known as the cheap option.

Brett Trainor (24:51.145)
Yeah.

Brett Trainor (25:07.37)
Yeah.

Dennis Geelen (25:11.861)
You don't want that race to the bottom and you don't want to be kicking yourself halfway through an engagement going, man, I'm not getting paid enough for this. You want to make sure it's worth your time. Right. So

Brett Trainor (25:20.126)
Right. We've all been there with that one for sure. And it's a good point before even a segue to four, because at three, it's the you know, that's kind of the advice I give folks too is, man, this is the problem that you're solving. This is the problem your framework is solving. And this is how much it costs to solve that problem. Is it worth you to have this problem solved? And, you know, I use that with folks that tell me they can't sell because I'm like, well, you're not don't think you're a salesman. Think of yourself as a problem solver.

Dennis Geelen (25:24.009)
Yeah.

Dennis Geelen (25:38.517)
Yeah.

Brett Trainor (25:48.458)
And there's a fee to solve this problem and this is how you do it. Right. So I pulled fiction, Mr. Wolf, he was a fixer, very expensive fixer, but he was a problem solver. He wasn't selling his services. Right. So, all right. So maybe that's a good. Exactly. So, but I would also still love your take on the next part, learn to, learn to sell what were some of the things you did and you now tell folks.

Dennis Geelen (25:48.485)
Exactly.

Yeah.

Dennis Geelen (25:55.401)
Exactly. Yeah. Yep. Exactly. Yep. I'm selling a solution for your problem. So

Dennis Geelen (26:10.82)
Yes.

So this was probably the biggest area that I had zero experience in. I was, I had a, um, a bad, I would say, um, idea of what sales was based on my corporate experience. I was never in sales. I always was the guy delivering after the salespeople would sell something. And I'd always be like, you told the customer what you promised, what you sold. The like it was, it always felt like they were snake oil salesmen and I was always there to clean up.

Brett Trainor (26:38.382)
Yep.

Dennis Geelen (26:43.285)
you know, the problem. So I always had this idea of, man, that's what I have to be now to sell myself. And what I learned was no, not at all. That's not how you sell. It's you solve problems, right? And a book that really helped me with this was one by a friend of mine, Ted Olson called, um, oh shoot, what's the name of it? It's on my bookshelf here. Um, feel good about selling.

And it's exact. It spoke to me. It was like, Hey, if this is your idea of sales, this book is for you. You need to learn how to solve problems, not be a salesman. And he takes us through all kinds of different tips and strategies for problem solving, for aligning with the customer and not making them feel like they're being pushed into a decision of, you know, making it feel like they're empowered to make the decision you're just laying out. Here's your challenges. Here's.

Here's the result if you don't solve this. Like where are you gonna be five years from now if you don't solve this problem? You paint that picture for them. Here's the benefits of solving it. Here's where you could be five years from now if you do solve this. Here's the proprietary solution that we have. Here's the results we get with the different testimonials. Up to you. You let me know if you think this is worthwhile talking about any further, right? You leave it in their court.

Brett Trainor (28:06.474)
Wow. Yeah, it makes absolutely sense. And it takes the stress out of it, right? Where you're trying to, I mean, the number of people that are still cold calling with features and benefits and it's just, it doesn't work. And every now and then I get one so bad, I'll message back and say, does this actually work? I mean, are you making any money doing this? I mean, there's just no way that somebody's responding to it. But maybe there's still a few folks that resonates with.

Dennis Geelen (28:09.665)
So, but you're there to solve their problem.

Dennis Geelen (28:20.206)
Yeah.

Dennis Geelen (28:27.894)
Exactly. Yeah.

Brett Trainor (28:35.222)
But maybe one follow-up I'd have for you on that, and I like to ask people is, you definitely want the referrals, the inbound through network. But on the occasion, I don't know, maybe do any outreach, like cold outreach. Do you have any suggestions or strategy to use when you're doing that for the first time?

Dennis Geelen (28:52.289)
Yeah. I don't do much anymore. In the beginning, I had to do a ton to get the ball rolling, get the momentum going, but it wasn't just throw a bunch of stuff at the wall and hope somebody, you know, responds. It was very targeted, very intentional, very personalized. I'm going to research, if this is my ideal client profile.

Brett Trainor (29:03.318)
really cool stuff.

Dennis Geelen (29:15.961)
Who are these people? And I would research either through LinkedIn or I'd look up through the chamber of commerce. I'd be looking up all the different organizations that kind of met that profile. And I'd be looking on their website to see, okay, who's on their leadership team. And do they speak in their website about, you know, some of the challenges they have or what they're doing or have they been growing really fast, you know, just to get a little bit understanding of who they are, where they're at. And then I would send.

a personalized outreach. Before that, actually I would check and see are these people active on LinkedIn? If they are, I'm just gonna engage with their content for a little bit first. I'm gonna comment on some of their posts I'm going to. Now, a lot of the people I was reaching out to weren't necessarily active on LinkedIn, so that wasn't a strategy, but if they were,

Brett Trainor (30:05.775)
Right.

Dennis Geelen (30:08.021)
Then when they did get a message from me, it wasn't feeling like it was coming at a left field. It was like, Oh, I recognize Dennis. He's been commenting on my posts the last two weeks. And then I would send them a message and say, Hey, I'm really enjoying this. I've seen you've been doing this with your company. I noticed that by the way, here's what I do. It might be worth a chat type thing. Um, very soft, very, uh, more personalized rather than pushy. So.

Brett Trainor (30:28.686)
soft ends.

Brett Trainor (30:33.066)
soft and personalized and try to add some value with it, whether or not, no matter what it is, share something that you had learned. The other thing too, that I think people under appreciate is check those LinkedIn connections, right? You'd be surprised who you may be connected to even. I mean, obviously we all have a lot of connections and not all of them are ones we know well enough that the weight would carry anything with an intro, but.

Dennis Geelen (30:39.683)
Yeah.

Dennis Geelen (30:48.655)
Yeah.

Brett Trainor (30:56.766)
A number of times that I've found somebody I'm like, Oh, I didn't realize they were connected reach out and they know them pretty well and they were more than happy to make an intro. If you get that warm intro, it's, it's even better. And again, back to our early conversation of, Hey, if you're just getting started, it's a numbers game and you don't need a ton of numbers. So how do you reduce the friction, right? Of, of going through this, this process. Now I think that's a, it's a great, great tip. And you just going to have to put a little bit more effort in up upfront, but. All right. So.

Dennis Geelen (31:14.37)
Yeah.

Dennis Geelen (31:23.128)
Yeah.

Brett Trainor (31:24.502)
We've got the learn to sell, which we're all still learning and refining. And, you know, as the buyers get smarter and the behaviors change, we have to adapt. But now we moved, would you say five and six or more of the, uh, advanced course or part two of the journey? Is that a fair way to say it?

Dennis Geelen (31:40.353)
Yes, that's, there's definitely a line after, after a part four, cause this is all about your high ticket offering, whether you're a coach, a consultant, a freelancer, some sort of fractional executive, you're selling something at a high ticket, right? So you need to really understand what's the problem you solve and for who, how am I packaging this? How am I selling this? How am I getting this in front of the right people? How am I building credibility? And you're doing that.

Brett Trainor (31:57.271)
Yes.

Dennis Geelen (32:08.849)
several times and you're learning from every different engagement that you're doing only once you've gotten to that point and you've really dialed this in now would I recommend, okay, now you're at a point where you can go build an audience because you know exactly what's working, what's not working. What are the, uh, questions that people are asking you? What are the very specific pain points? You've really dialed in your offer. Now go build your audience. Um, that

is important that you do that first, that whole high ticket offering first before you go and build that audience. And the reason I say that is because I see all kinds of people going I'm just gonna go build an audience. And then I'll figure out how to sell to them later. I'm like, well, who's your audience? Why is somebody following you?

If you're just going out, there's all kinds of ways to build an audience. But why are people following you at the end of the day, when you go and try and sell them something, 95% of those people that you've built an audience around probably aren't going to resonate with what you're selling now because after the fact you're saying, Oh, by the way, I have this thing to sell you. Well, that's not why I was following you. I followed you because you posted stuff about dogs or I followed you because you know, you wrote about politics or you know what I mean? Like you can build an audience. Um,

Brett Trainor (33:22.349)
I know.

Brett Trainor (33:25.62)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Dennis Geelen (33:27.729)
Easily if you try and appeal to everyone but they're not gonna buy what you're selling So dial in what you do and how you do it and then build that audience So then at that point at the final step then is now I can now I can have some extra revenue streams Books courses, you know cheat sheets downloads, whatever Because I already know I've built the right audience

and it's the right people that are following me for the right reason, who are probably gonna be interested in this. And now I don't have to try and sell this high ticket thing to all these people. I can still do that, but this larger audience I've built might be interested in these low ticket offerings that I have.

Brett Trainor (34:09.574)
Yeah. And again, my super simple brain goes, right? We've worked really hard on the one to one, right? Build a one to one. But then when you can start to leverage that into one to many or one to few, then one to many, then things can take off and you don't have to work directly with every one of those clients. The other thing I liked about the extra income and one I don't think a lot of the escapees are thinking about is...

Dennis Geelen (34:19.958)
Yep.

Brett Trainor (34:33.686)
different revenue streams. So maybe not from an audience, but I'd love your perspective on this. So like when I left, I started consulting, realized that I really don't like the consulting aspect moved into fractional, even though I didn't really know what fractional was at the time and got that found then more into advisory and now with the escapees, the coaching and some of those programs, but what I was found and had some success with it was, you know, being a reseller of certain services or products.

Dennis Geelen (34:52.354)
Yep.

Brett Trainor (35:00.322)
that people were trying to get into B to B company. I mean, I had 30 year network of sales and marketing executives across a number of different companies that if I came across somebody that I've liked, you know, it really wasn't hard for me to make introductions into companies. And like I said, I have not formalized this process, but there's different revenue streams that you can leverage off of that expertise you're bringing from corporate.

Dennis Geelen (35:08.715)
Yeah.

Dennis Geelen (35:24.215)
Yeah.

Brett Trainor (35:25.438)
He can make small bets here. It's not like you have to go all in and build a business unit off this thing. Just go see if you can, you know, make some money. And I know just with what the way you've expanded and you've looked and tested, I think you subscribe to that methodology or mentality.

Dennis Geelen (35:30.21)
Yep.

Dennis Geelen (35:39.617)
Yes. Yeah. My, my, the, where I try to be careful is as long as the different things I'm offering are still kind of around that same niche, right? If I all of a sudden start to expand into other niches, a is that going to confuse my audience and B do I have the time to invest in understanding all these different things? Right? So yes, I sell consulting and coaching and books and courses.

Brett Trainor (36:02.568)
Exactly.

Dennis Geelen (36:06.925)
And I have a newsletter that I sell, I sell sponsorships in. I do events and workshops. I do speaking engagements, but they're all around the same thing. It's just different ways of monetizing that same problem that I solve.

Brett Trainor (36:17.23)
break.

Brett Trainor (36:21.346)
Yeah, no, it's such a good point. And I think about people coming out of corporate, it's kind of the same thing, right? Fractional may make sense if you're in a leadership role and fractional actually makes sense in kind of functional areas as well, but there may be opportunities to do a consulting project, right? That you came across that fits what your background doing the same thing. And then there could be again, reseller with technologies that are in that thing, that somebody that has this CRM and you know, a ton of people in marketing, these areas, you can make a couple of introductions, a hundred percent agree. You don't want to, you know,

Dennis Geelen (36:35.727)
Yeah.

Dennis Geelen (36:48.034)
Yep.

Brett Trainor (36:51.042)
build a yogurt shop and then be also doing consulting services for carpet clean. I'm just making stuff up, but yeah, stay close to your core. But again, break out of that box that corporates put you in for 20 or 30 years and think bigger and be opportunistic. And the other thing I've really started to subscribe to more is the Pareto principle, 80-20, right? 20% of the effort gives you 80% of the results.

Dennis Geelen (36:56.309)
Yeah.

Dennis Geelen (37:09.614)
Yep.

Dennis Geelen (37:19.684)
Yes.

Brett Trainor (37:20.014)
Make a number of those 20% bets and see where you get the traction and what you'd like to do. And then you can start to double down on that. So.

Dennis Geelen (37:23.893)
Yeah.

Dennis Geelen (37:28.877)
Yeah, it just makes sense. I mean, if you go back to our corporate days, it was, I was doing this. This was my expertise and I got paid one way. A bi-weekly paycheck. Now it's like, okay, here's my expertise. There's infinite number of ways I can monetize this. Right? I can do speaking. I can do coaching. I can do consulting. I can write books. I can do courses. You know, there's all kinds of stuff I can do, but I'm still just doing the same thing over and over again, same expertise, same stuff.

Brett Trainor (37:39.337)
I'm sorry.

Dennis Geelen (37:56.27)
And there's no cap. It's not like, hey, you're going to get a 2% raise on this year. You can get as much as you want, equivalent to the effort and the creativity you put into it. So.

Brett Trainor (38:06.102)
Yeah, no, 100% agree. And you said that much better than I did rambling for two minutes. But all right, I know we're starting to run short on time. But I do want to close with your newsletter because I think it's a lot of fun and interesting. And you talk a lot about surface area or surface area for luck. Can we close on that? What sent you down that space and? Yeah.

Dennis Geelen (38:23.669)
Yep. Yes.

Dennis Geelen (38:28.617)
Yeah, it's it is a fun story. So I titled my book, The Accidental Solopreneur and I kind of call myself the accidental solopreneur because I never intended to go down this road. It was a layoff, kind of meandered my way through and accidentally stumbled across things. Now I've got coaching now. It was all an accident. It wasn't a master plan. So when the book came out, and like you people were reading it going, Oh, that sounds like my story. And this was that and all these other people started going

Oh, did you hear about this that happened by accident? Or did you hear about this product that was created by accident? Or did you hear about this company that did this by accident? And I went, Oh, this is kind of cool. These, these accidental success stories are everywhere. I thought, well, that, that kind of makes a cool premise for a newsletter, but being the entrepreneur who, who wants to test things and, and get some market data first, like I've learned, I thought, okay, I'm going to, I'm going to research some of these stories. By this point I had built.

an audience, I think I was at around 10 or 11,000 followers on LinkedIn. So I thought, okay, I can, that's a great testing ground. I'm going to share once a week, one of these accidental success stories and see if they perform as well as some of my other posts while they were outperforming. The other posts. So I'm okay. People like this. This does tell me that there's interest in these stories for a newsletter. So then I just announced one day, okay, this is the last of these accidental success stories here.

Brett Trainor (39:44.43)
Yeah, yeah.

Dennis Geelen (39:55.937)
If you want to keep getting them, sign up for the newsletter. It's going to start in two weeks. So before that first edition of the newsletter came out, I already had like close to 200 people signed up for the newsletter and it's just growing from there. I just crossed over a thousand, um, last month and I've monetized it so that, uh, you know, people are now paying to sponsor the newsletter because, Hey, they know there's a captive audience there and people are just loving the stories and I've just played with it. Okay. What

It's a great way to test, okay, what, what subject lines do people like better? Cause this one gets a better open rate than this one. Okay. What causes people to want to click on things? And you know, I've tested embedding, Tik TOK videos versus articles versus YouTube's versus, you know, it's just a fun way a to tell some fun stories, true stories. There's the lessons we can learn from them. And then all these lessons I'm getting from how to grow a newsletter audience. So

Brett Trainor (40:43.734)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Brett Trainor (40:51.67)
Fantastic. No, it's a fun read. So I highly encourage folks to check out all of your content, but I think that's really good too. So you've been very kind with your time today. I'm going to have to bring you back again because I think there's so much value and we only dug into the surface level on quite a bit of this. So best place for people to track you down if they want to learn more. Obviously, we talked about the newsletter, the books. What's the best way to do this?

Dennis Geelen (41:15.929)
Yeah. So my website has everything. So that's www.DennisGeelein.me or LinkedIn is the social media platform that I'm on the most.

Brett Trainor (41:29.367)
Awesome. Dennis, well, I appreciate your time. Uh, when's the next, you get another book in the, uh, the hopper or you're, you're taking a little bit of break.

Dennis Geelen (41:36.137)
I haven't started writing. I've got a few ideas and I'm just trying to figure out which one would be the best idea for the next book. So stay tuned.

Brett Trainor (41:43.498)
Love it. Love it. Awesome. Well, thank you again, Dennis. Appreciate it. And we'll, uh, we'll catch up with you soon.

Dennis Geelen (41:49.226)
Awesome. Thanks for having me, Brett.