Welcome back, friend…so glad you’re here listening in. Please hit the subscribe button so you don’t miss any episodes. I’m Tom Clairmont and I’m going to dive into this topic that will hopefully stir the soul: Do you have a higher calling in life? Today, we'll explore the depths of this question and hopefully reveal how discovering your higher calling can transform your entrepreneurial journey. So, let's dive in! Have you ever felt a deep yearning within your heart, a sense that there's...

Welcome back to another exciting episode of the Small Business Startup Essentials Show! I'm thrilled to have you join me today as we explore a topic that many entrepreneurs face: "What should you do when there is too much opportunity?" Get ready to navigate these murky waters with me here today about the possibilities and opportunities we face and discover how to make the most of our situation without getting sidetracked with too many shiny objects. So, let's dive right in! You know, I...

Welcome back, my fellow entrepreneurs, to another episode of the Small Business Startup Essentials Show! I'm Tom Clairmont and I’m here to help you work through the issues of having an online personal brand business. And in this episode, I’ll be talking about one of the perpetual problems that we all seem to have from time to time… going through the motions and getting little results. So, if you've ever felt stuck in whatever situation you’re in…whether it’s through, the dream process, the...

Today, we're going to tackle this common challenge that many of us have had to deal with from time to time head-on and discover how to get past imposter syndrome to help unlock your true potential. So, let's dive in! Imposter syndrome—a very common and often paralyzing feeling that many of us experience at some point in our entrepreneurial journey. It's that nagging voice in our heads that tells us we're not good enough, that we're a fraud, because we’re doing something new and maybe...

So….you want to be a Solopreneur. Own your own business. Make money online by monetizing your expertise. Fantastic. I’m with you on that concept. But when I started out, I was under the impression that I had to do it all myself. You know, that ‘solo’ is in Solopreneur for a reason, right? And with that burden of doing it all myself, comes a bunch of stress and questions that don’t get resolved. The stress with the misconceptions of having to do everything myself (there are a lot of things...

In this episode, I was able to interview a long time LinkedIn favorite of mine, John Nemo. I first came across John three years ago and was a regular for his 'Noon with Nemo' webinar sessions. After buying a couple of his books on taking LinkedIn to another level and how to improve my marketing tactics, I started to see real results with my LinkedIn experience and productivity. When people reach out to me and hire me because of LinkedIn, I know that I'm doing something right, and I owe...

In this episode, we're going to hear from Danielle Jefferson, from Jefferson James Consulting about her transition out of her Corporate job and into having her own business. Listen in on her journey through the ups and downs of the transition and how she worked out a plan for success that works for her but can also work for you as well. 8:15 The next step was to take sales training through a course 10:45 Why she changed her business model 11:50 The mindset stuggles from leaving her job to...

In this episode, I talk to Dennis Geelen about his journey from working in the Corporate realm to finding himself without a job and creating a new path for his life through starting his own business. 3:00 The start of his entrepreneurial journey when he was laid off from his job 6:00 The new mindset of ‘What if this works?’ 9:45 How he was able to get his first clients with his new business 12:10 The need to switch the niche until he found something that was a better fit 14:30 The transition...

Friends, today, I have with me someone that I find very interesting that I came across on my favorite platform, LinkedIn. Michael J Penney. Michael J. Penney is a proven, battle tested leader. Michael is a combat veteran of Iraq & Afghanistan. He served in the United States Marine Corps for 8 years through 2 wars. But then In March of 2016 he presented at TEDxRaleigh, “What’s Your IED: How to Add Value During Life's Explosive Situations”, combining military and personal experiences in an...

Friends today I have with us Marc Miller, the best selling author of Repurpose Your Career a Practical Guide for the Second Half of Life, Podcast host of the Repurpose your Career Podcast and a huge advocate for assisting older adults to make that later in life transition into a better place for themselves. Marc has a long history of personal career pivots, after his long history with IBM and found that after helping people with their career changes, he found his own passion as well…to start...

I came across mind mapping years ago and it’s always helped me to see an overall plan in a great visual way. Always. If you’re not familiar with mind mapping, what is it? Well, if you’ve ever drawn out a diagram on a napkin or piece of paper, that’s what I’m talking about, but now, it’s in a more modern, computer generated sort of way. A Mind Map is an easy way to brainstorm your thoughts and plans and allows you to visually structure your ideas so you can see from a different angle how your...

We all have a past, right? Not something we can forget about or ignore, even if we try. And it’s always a mix of all the ups and downs in life. We’ve probably got more of the downs than we’d like to remember, but, that’s life.  Some good things. Some very good things, and some not so good things as well. But we can learn from the past. We can take all the good and the bad and use it all for what we want to step into for the next chapter in our lives. Now why would I have this as a topic...

Friends, there are times in our lives when we have to make a decision. We can think about stuff all day long and put things off, but eventually…eventually, we somehow come to the point of ‘I’ve had enough of this. Something needs to change.’ Right? I don’t know what it is, sometimes. I don’t have a formula for why this happens to me or anybody. But it does. We sit on the sidelines and watch. We listen to others succeed and we wait. We have these thoughts of how we want things to be but we...

I spend a lot of time on LinkedIn. And I think LI is fantastic. But I see a lot of people’s profiles that totally miss the mark on the message it sends. Too many people still have that old mindset of trying to lift themselves up and put themselves on a pedestal. All the things they’ve accomplished. How many degrees they have. Me, me, me. Look at me and how great I am. Friends, if you’re on LinkedIn or Instagram, or whatever platform you’re using, and you’re using it to try to get clients, you...

You’re Not Alone If you’re in the planning stages of starting a solopreneur type business, or maybe you already launched one, you’ll more than likely be having the same thoughts and questions that all the other solopreneurs have. Questions like: ·      How do I start? ·      What should I focus on? ·      How can I possibly get all this stuff done? ·      What about all that techie stuff that I’m supposed to know and do? Well, first of all, I’d just like to say, ‘You’re not alone.’ This is...

In the last episode, I covered the topic of ‘should you create a webinar for your business’. I did an overview of the process and how much is involved in making a webinar so that you can decide on your own if you have enough time or money to have one done and if you think it’s right for you. But what I didn’t cover was the topic of effectiveness, so I have some stats on webinars today that I think will help you as well so that you can make an informed decision. Now, I know that stats can be...

Webinars seem to be the new rage lately, right? More and more, we’re seeing them pop up all over as a source of providing information by video for a wide spectrum of industries and businesses. And for good reason, I think. If they’re created with great, informative and compelling content that meets a real need, and done with professionalism…and then add in the on-demand option so you can watch it anytime, and you have yourself a winning webinar. But there are certain aspects of webinars that...

I don’t know about you, but there are times in my life when I think I need to make a serious course correction.  Sometimes it’s about personal things. Sometimes it’s about my business and whether or not to keep going in the same direction or to make some course corrections along the way.  And when life happens to us…things that we can’t avoid or control, and we need to make these serious changes, it’s good to have a great book in your hands to read that will help you to sort through the...

We live in a time where information and influence comes as easy as breathing. Whatever we want to know or learn about, we can pursue it and either read or watch videos on it. No topic seems to be untapped. But because we have all of this information at our fingertips, we can easily get information overload. And with all this information, get lost in the process of what to do with it. Now, I’m a process and procedure sort of guy. I like to have things done in a certain order so that I don’t...

What Is a Personal Brand? Well friends, I’m sure that there are a lot of people that already have this personal brand stuff figured out, but there may be some of you listening that need a bit more clarification to what all this ‘personal brand’ stuff is and how they should think of it. Because for me, when I started out, the meaning has sort of shifted a bit over the past 20 years and to be honest, I really like the way the definition evolved over time. And just to be clear, when I started my...

Is there a ‘right’ time to start a business? Hello again friends, I have a topic here today that is a very popular one for sure. When should you start a business? Is there a right time, a right opportunity, a right situation, a right…answer? And if you go to Google trends and type in ‘the right time to start a business’, you’ll see that over the past 5 years, the results, in the US, and around the world, shows that this topic has been gaining steam since around May of 2020. Why? Well,...

If you’ve been listening for awhile, you may have heard in episode 58 titled ‘the tools we use’, I briefly went over some of the software tools I use to run my business and why I use them. I even created a free download of a pdf on this very same topic with the links to click on to get them in order for you to save some time. And that’s what this is all about for me here in doing these types of things…saving you time and money and helping you along the way by learning what works for me so...

Imposter syndrome. It can be very real. And it keeps coming up in conversations that I have with people. Feeling like a phony. Feeling like you shouldn’t be doing what you’re doing. Feeling like you’re not the person that you say you are. You see, when you’re just getting started, and you don’t have clients or customers yet, and you’re just spending time tweaking your website and poking around on social media, it can feel like you’re just going through the motions. You’re telling people...

So, you want to finally go forward with starting a business. This is something you’re sure about and you’ve got the confidence and determination to work through the problems and find a way to succeed.  But you’re finding that there’s a lot more to learn than you originally thought. A lot. And it seems that with every step forward, you’re getting the impression that you’re taking two learning steps back.  You have all these ideas but you’re not sure how to put them into action and piece this...

Hey friends and loyal listeners. I’ll be taking a 2 week break from the Podcast while I’m on vacation. After almost 100 episodes, I’m still far from finished talking about one of my favorite subjects…helping people get their online business launched and helping them with both the how to’s and all the tech involved. Some of the topics I’ve been working on for future episodes are • Getting past imposter syndrome • Do something now! • Confidence beats formal education • My favorite tools part...