We recently connected with Alejandro I. Sanoja and have shared our conversation below.

Alejandro I., looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Let’s kick things off with your mission – what is it and what’s the story behind why it’s your mission?

Alejandro I. Sanoja is the founder of Latinpresarios and has been named 1 of the 6 Personal Branding Experts to Follow in 2022. He is an award-winning MBA, a TEDx & Bilingual Speaker, a guest lecturer at several MBA entrepreneurship and financial investment management classes.

He has faced economies with inflation levels of more than one million percent (this is not a typo, 1,000,000.00% inflation), GDP drops of more than 30% in a year, and rumor has it he once had to cross the US-Mexico border on foot at midnight.

The efforts needed to surpass these obstacles helped Alejandro build a Stoic mindset that landed him at the top of his MBA class as the Outstanding MBA Student. Yet, even with the award, an all-A’s scorecard, and a strong network of influential people willing to make introductions and write recommendation letters, as graduation day was approaching he still had not secured a job.

After 2 years of piling debt, because international students cannot work while they go to school, any type of cash flow was a priority.

This is when Matt Avery, a classmate and mentor, took a chance on Alejandro and invited him to join his 1-person marketing consulting company. There was no paycheck though, all income was a commission depending on how many clients they were able to find and serve together.

Starting from $0 in recurring revenue, in less than 2 years they were able to secure several clients on retainer and were on their way to building a boutique marketing consulting company with more than $250,000 in annual recurring revenue.

But were they really building a business or should we call them glorified self-employed freelancers?
Just at the point when their client pipeline was running dry because all of their time was dedicated to servicing their clients, and they were thinking about the possibility of expansion by hiring more people, they had to scale back.

For more than 6 months, Alejandro was unable to work due to ongoing immigration processes (ah the fun life of an immigrant). It is after this time off that Latinpresarios was born. And Alejandro had to start from scratch again.

In less than a year, Alejandro was able to, again, secure several clients on retainer but realized that he was going to hit the same wall that he and Matt had faced before.

The wall that all “business owners” hit at some point.

This is when you are juggling between putting on your “sales” hat some days and your “doer” hat other days.

Some days you dust off your CRM (usually a Google spreadsheet), send some cold messages, try to get referrals from current clients, reach out to your network, go to events, and you basically everything you can do to get leads and grow your business.

And once you get leads, you then put on your “do whatever it takes” hat and service your clients. Until a project or a contract ends and you have to do it all over again.

It is at this point that all entrepreneurs have to make a decision!
Do you play it safe and keep playing that game of wearing different hats and remain self-employed? Or do you make an investment to transform your freelancing efforts into a business that can scale?

Alejandro took his brother’s recommendation and guidance (since he had already built a successful international SEO agency) which led him to picking a niche and building a team.

He put together a small team with the goal of helping him build his personal brand so that he would not have to wear the “sales” hat ever again.

As he was working on picking a niche, Alejandro realized his path to marketing was different than the one most people travel. He did not have experience in a big agency and he was not a specialist in any particular area of marketing. Frankly, he did not even have a lot of experience in the marketing industry. This is when Alejandro realized that all the clients and projects he was able to get were because people trusted him.

He wasn’t getting clients because people trusted his experience or some big name brands on his resume. He was getting clients because of the reputation he had been able to build as a professional.

People trusted that Alejandro was going to deliver on his promise.
Without knowing so, he had been building his personal brand since the moment he set foot in the United States. And now, he is doing so worldwide thanks to the power of creating and distributing content consistently.

Latinpresarios now has a team of writers, videographers, designers, project managers, and personal branding consultants that serves clients all across the United States (and soon the world) by leveraging the power of the digital tools at our disposal.

All done with a fully remote team. All done through organic efforts.

You’ll never see Alejandro, or his team, sending a cold email, doing cold calls, going to events to network with the sole purpose of getting leads, or doing ANY kind of pitchslapping on LinkedIn.

We create great content that ranks well for “personal branding” related topics on several platforms (which is likely how you ended up here) and we just wait until our ideal clients come to us.

And we want to help you achieve this same transformation. So that you can stop having to worry about where your next client is going to come from and start building a business that is scalable.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers

We are a Personal Branding Agency That Hates Cold Outreach!

We believe that no expert should waste their time, or risk their reputation, by doing any kind of cold outreach.

If you are someone who knows how to solve a particular problem then anyone who has that problem should be aware of your services and should come to you when they face such a problem.

At Latinpresarios, we are sure that the best way to grow a business is through building trust by positioning yourself as the go-to thought leader in your niche.

We do that by turning you, the expert, into a storyteller. We help you leverage audio, video, and text to share your message in a way that allows you to dominate your niche as the go-to thought leader.

Are there any books, videos or other content that you feel have meaningfully impacted your thinking?

It is said that many years ago, a wise man figured out most of the truths of our existence as humans. One of those truths was figuring out which were the most valuable books.

For this reason, many people waited for months and sometimes years to get face-to-face time with this master to ask them a question.

One day, someone asked him “Master, it is said that you have read more than 3,000 books. And that after doing so, you have figured out which, out of those 3,000, are the most important. Would you please tell me which are the 3 most important books I should read?”

And the master answered “I cannot tell you which are the 3 most important books for you. If you want to find out, you have to read 3,000.”

I am currently on that path of reading 3,000 books. If I keep my current pace, I should get there when I’m about 80 years. So please come back and ask me about the most impactful books then.

There are many that have been impactful and I share reviews of all the books that I read on our book club’s website (https://latinpresarios.com/book-club/). I also share a monthly newsletter with highlights from the 4-10 books I read every month as well as recommendations on who I think will find these valuable.

Where do you think you get most of your clients from?

The best source of new clients for me is to let the people that need my services find me.

I do so by building a personal brand.

Before, I used to try to find clients in the typical ways most people do:

– Asking for referrals
– Prospecting online
– Going to events
– Ads

What I find is that there is nothing more powerful than having a meeting with a potential client when they already know you, like you, and trust you because they see you as an authority. When they have a problem, are looking for answers, and all the ways lead to you, then the likelihood of a successful engagement increases exponentially.

If they search for solutions on LinkedIn, Google, and YouTube, and they always find you as the top answer, the probability of them becoming a client is much higher than with any of the other methods of finding new clients.

You can also command higher prices, and pick who you’d like to work with because demand will be higher than supply.

In the past, people took an average of 5 visits to a dealership before buying a car. That number, nowadays, is 1.5 visits. The way people are buying is changing. Even with high ticket items such as a car.

This means that those people who leverage their personal brand, by creating content in all its forms (video, audio, images, and text), will be seen as the go-to thought leaders in their niche.

And that content works 24/7. So it will be working as your sales and marketing team as you sleep or use your time to do something else that you value more like spending time with your family, reading, or hobbies.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://latinpresarios.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mindfulbusiness/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alejandrosanoja/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGUK9j7AxNidHLCe3DVerwg
• Other: Free Guide, with 8 examples and templates, on how to write a personal branding statement: https://latinpresarios.com/examples-of-personal-branding-statement/

Image Credits
Nicki Evans