How To Build A Company Like Richard Branson

I’m looking at the number of different websites I’m building all centred around the Pearl Lemon brand –

Properties,?Leads, Accounting and?SEO.

4 areas of focus that may be well over time end up being 8 areas of focus who knows?

At a high level, it seems like a terrible way to grow a business — but I wanted to ground my approach in logic and present to you how much sense this is making for me.

And I’ll do it by discussing the?Richard Branson?ethos if you will –

With the growth of his personal as well as company brand — Richard Branson has been able to grow an empire.

I can’t remember ‘which’ Virgin he started with — but once the brand was built — it’s given him amazing leverage in being able to build out new units of his company –

This should underline the model as being one that works.

40 Virgin companies operating in 35 countries and employing over 60,000 people — incredible right?

Depending upon where you google — it’s even more than that:

My approach with all of this is interest led (i.e I go into a space I have some experience and interest in) as well as SEO-led (in the initial stages I seek to build a good looking website and then rank it on Google).

This is exactly the ethos I’m taking with the property and accounting website. I’ve built websites and get around 50 blogs written and run SEO in parallel.

Then the idea is that within 1.5 years it’ll have turned into a website that generates regular leads.

I rely almost solely on Google traffic for the growth of the business. The other space I’m beginning to focus upon is YouTube growth as much as I can.

So with each new business function, I’ll try and record around 52 videos (1 per week) so I have at least a year’s worth of video content.

Once this has been recorded I can return to focussing on the day to day runnings of?Pearl Lemon.

With each new brand that’s built — it gets easier and easier. Certainly if I compare the building out of the Pearl Lemon website as compared to building out Pearl Lemon Accountants — it’s very different.

With Pearl Lemon Accountants I’ve already produced 5–7 service pages, have had around 20 blogs written (all with keyword research), have a location for Google Maps and all…and it’s been less than one month.

Furthermore, once I’ve built the operations team — I’ll be able to cross-sell our services.

Today I’m bringing in our first full-time New Business Director — who’ll be focussed upon bringing in new business for our marketing side of the business.

However, I’m already in half a mind to appoint him as the overall group sales director rather than just selling the marketing side of the company.

Right now, the reliance upon solely on Google is worrying for us — because if we ever get hit by a Google algorithm update we could run into trouble.

This is why building an outbound sales function (beginning with rockstar #1 is critical for me).

Once he proves he can drive 3–7x his salary I’ll bring in person #2 and repeat until I have a team of 3–5 outbound sales guys driving new business for the company.

Across the group we generate 300 leads more or less — and I’m keen to keep growing this.

And this is where the other websites we have come in:

• Deepak Shukla
• Serpwizz
• Plant Sumo
• Send Koala
• Resume Cats

All of these websites are growing from a traffic perspective and I hope they can generate new business for us as well.

I’d like between everything to get us to a place where we have 5,000 leads a month — which is a lofty ambition but if we’re able to nail our SEO effectively across the board — it should be absolutely doable.

We’re in the process of building out every one of these websites and I don’t see it not working.

Each of these niches are proven spaces with operators working within them doing 7-figures.

So whilst it seems my focus is spread — from a link-building and content standpoint — we have a pretty formidable team that can push out work with consistency.

This shows no signs of slowing down which is great.

And given this is the main thrust of marketing I think it’ll only bode well for us as we move forward.

Anyway — that’s it for today.

Actually — let me finish with giving you some tactical insights:

Focus on having a consistent lead-generation strategy

My channel #1 is SEO. This has been proven to work for me with Pearl Lemon and Pearl Lemon Leads. I’m now doing the same for our other websites.

Channel #2 is YouTube which hasn’t worked as of yet but I’m experimenting with this

Channel #3 is Outbound sales which begins today

Learn how to sell

This is critical if you’re in the service industry as we heavily are. You need to be able to get on phone calls and close deals.

If you can do this — you’ll ultimately be able to sell anything

Build an amazing team

It is true that with the right people — you can grow an organization really effectively. So when you DO find those core people — do all you can to nurture them and let them grow.

Build under the same brand umbrella to make cross-sales easier

This is something I’m unsure of why companies don’t do when they’re single person/entity owned. I’m building the accounting and property brand under the same Pearl Lemon umbrella to take advantage of our main brand.

It makes all sales easier and makes each launch easier!

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So there you have it.

This is how I’m trying to grow the Pearl Lemon brand by (loosely) copying what Richard is doing.

Thanks Richard!

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