We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Brian Lofrumento. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Brian below.

Alright, Brian thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. How did you come up with the idea for your business?

I guess “the” idea really started all the way back when I started my first business when I was 19 years old. It was the summer after freshman year of college, and I definitely used that fact to my advantage. Rather than guessing when it came to marketing and growth strategies and tactics, I was emailing all of my “competitors” and asking them for advice and hopping on Skype (this was 2008, after all!) to learn from them. What I found was that all of these amazing business owners were so generous in sharing their advice, strategies, experiences, tools, and wisdom with me, and that accelerated my own growth and journey.

Fast forward to 2016 and I was at a bit of a crossroads in my entrepreneurial journey. I had started two businesses up to that point and grew them beyond what I could’ve dreamed of, but I was feeling so burned out with client work. I did some self-reflection and realized that what I really loved from both of those businesses was the building that goes into getting any business off the ground. I loved figuring out product-market fit, I loved putting together marketing plans from scratch, I loved figuring out sales processes, and I loved all of the small decisions that it takes to take a business from idea to execution. And most of all, I loved how generous entrepreneurs are with each other as we exchange ideas, strategies, energy, and excitement.

That’s why I sat down and decided to record the first 10 episodes of the Wantrepreneur to Entrepreneur Podcast, which is now a top 1.5% podcast in the world, with listeners in over 150 countries. We’re more than 1,000 episodes into this journey, and it all stemmed from the fact that so many other entrepreneurs were generous in accelerating my growth journey, so I want to continue making that advice, those conversations, and that generosity and transparency accessible to wantrepreneurs and entrepreneurs at all stages of their own growth journeys.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

Sure! I’m Brian, and I’ve been an entrepreneur for 17 years now, having started my first business when I was 19 years old. It’s crazy thinking back on what it meant for me to become an entrepreneur, because the truth is that I had no idea that’s what I was doing! Back in 2008 I was completing my freshman year of college and realized that it’s too easy to waste your time in school on video games, tossing a frisbee around instead of going to class, and all the social things that come along with the college experience, so I decided to start a soccer blog. I’ve always loved soccer, I’ve always loved writing, and I’ve always loved the internet, so it felt like a perfect thing to spend my time on.

Fast forward to junior year of college and the site had grown into one of the most-read soccer websites in the world, with over 3.5 million readers coming to our website every month. I was leading a team of 20 writers, I was interviewing some of the biggest names in the world of soccer, and I was flying to England to catch games at stadiums I had only ever seen on TV. Needless to say, that blog grew into a fully-fledged business and it absolutely changed my life.

After graduating, I realized that all of those experiences gave me tangible skills that had value in the marketplace beyond just getting a traditional 9 to 5 job. I had learned – and practiced – skills as a business owner that could benefit others, such as Search Engine Optimization (SEO), digital marketing, web development, web analytics, monetization, and so much more, so I decided to start an agency that would offer those services to other companies.

I did relatively well with that agency, growing it to six-figures in revenue in just our first year of business (despite the fact that my business partner and I were two 22-year olds that were figuring it all out as we went!). After a couple years of client-based work, though, I was experiencing burnout for the first time in my life, and could feel myself needing a reset.

I traveled the world quite a bit from that point, and it was while I was at an entrepreneurial event in Costa Rica in 2015 that I realized all of my experiences, reflections, and lessons were brewing inside of me and asking to come out into the world, and it just so happened to be in the shape of a book! It’s funny how things come full-circle, and my love for writing was once again bubbling up to the surface. So, I sat down and over the course of two weeks the entire book – Wantrepreneur to Entrepreneur – came to life. Thanks to my marketing prowess, that self-published book reached and impacted people all over the world, and I was waking up to emails from complete strangers telling me how it inspired them to start the business they’d always dreamed of.

But there was one confusing part about those emails… they were all asking me how they could get “more!” More? I didn’t have another book in me, but after a year of wondering how I could give people more, I launched the Wantrepreneur to Entrepreneur Podcast. I had no idea what to expect, but within the first week we hit the top charts, and now eight years later we’re one of the top 1.5% of all shows in the world, consistently ranking as one of the Top 200 business and marketing shows.

So, five days per week you can catch me on the air having open and transparent conversations with the most amazing real-life entrepreneurs in all industries and at all different stages of their growth journeys. On top of that, based on all the work I’ve continued to do aside from just the podcast, I have a portfolio of businesses that I either own or advise, and I’m also in the process of launching an entrepreneurial foundation to make entrepreneurship more accessible for anyone and everyone who wants to start and grow a business that makes the world a better place.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

I think resilience is displayed over time rather than in one moment, which brings me all the way back to my first six months as an entrepreneur. The truth is, in my first six months with my soccer blog I made a grand total of $200, yet I continued writing articles, I continued hitting “publish,” and I continued investing my time in making the website better, understanding my analytics, getting to know my small but growing audience and what they wanted, and continued day-dreaming about how I could grow into one of the world’s top soccer websites.

It’s easy to continue doing all of these things when you’re getting instant results. After all, if we all got results every time we stepped foot in the gym, it would be a lot easier to go to the gym every day. The reality, of course, is that if we go to the gym today – and tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that – then we won’t see any changes. It’s only when we go every day for weeks or months that anything changes at all, and that’s where resilience comes in.

I could’ve – and maybe should’ve – had thousands of reasons to quit during my first six months when money and traffic wasn’t coming my way, but I dug in and knew that those were the days and the moments that most other people would quit. And when you persist through things that stop most other people, a lot of times you get to be the last one standing, and I think we underestimate the value in that.

Sure enough, month by month, “lucky” break after “lucky” break, some small things went in our favor the longer we were continuing to hit publish and continuing to do the work, and within a few years we had a huge and loyal audience and were getting the attention of the BBC, large newspapers in England, and found ourselves in press conferences and pitchside at some of the world’s biggest games.

There wasn’t a single moment in time where everything changed overnight, but instead good things kept happening the longer we just kept grinding and hitting publish. To me, that’s where resilience is displayed.

It’s funny, because those early lessons have followed through to almost 20 years later, where I’m constantly reminded about the power of resilience. Any time people compliment me on my podcast’s growth journey and accomplishments, I can’t help but think back to the fact that those people weren’t admiring our work when we were just starting out. It took years of work – regardless of whether results were coming or not coming – to see the progress, and to me the ultimate form of resilience is just that I’m more willing than most to keep hitting publish. You’d be amazed at how many good things can happen if you just keep doing that. Do anything 1,000 times and I’m sure you’ll start to see the power of resilience.

Are there any books, videos, essays or other resources that have significantly impacted your management and entrepreneurial thinking and philosophy?

Without a doubt, the biggest influence on my entrepreneurial thinking has been “The Magic of Thinking Big” by Dr. David J. Schwartz. Put simply, one of the earliest things Dr. Schwartz writes in that book is that “success is determined not so much by the size of one’s brain as it is by the size of one’s thinking,” and it’s been a truth that I’ve witnessed time and time again in my life so far. I remember being early on in my entrepreneurial journey and seeing people with far less knowledge than me doing far better than me, and I wondered why… and this book gave me invaluable insights into how and why we’ll always be limited – or enabled! – by the size of our thinking.

In a world where there are always a million reasons to wait, to “play it safe,” to feel “not ready,” or to convince ourselves why something might not work, this book is a constant reminder about the power of our minds and how what we choose to feed it will dictate the type of life that we live.

This is the only book that I read time and time again, year after year, because every single time I take something new away from it. Our mind is our most powerful thing, and we’re the only ones that get to choose if we feed and strengthen our inner critic or our inner champion, and every time we feed one of those it gets stronger. That’s great news for you and I, because if we start consistently choosing our inner champion then we start to realize that anything truly is possible.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.thewantrepreneurshow.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/imetbrian
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/brianlofrumento/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brianlofrumento/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@BrianLofrumento