We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Gerald Bass a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Gerald, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Coming up with the idea is so exciting, but then comes the hard part – executing. Too often the media ignores the execution part and goes from idea to success, skipping over the nitty, gritty details of executing in the early days. We think that’s a disservice both to the entrepreneurs who built something amazing as well as the public who isn’t getting a realistic picture of what it takes to succeed. So, we’d really appreciate if you could open up about your execution story – how did you go from idea to execution?

I started back in 2015 hosting a call every week called “The Rise Of The 1%.”, where I interviewed successful entrepreneurs who were on their way into rising into the top 1% of what they did or where already in the top 1% of what they did and I Iet the public hop on and listen to the interviews every week.

At the time I was also currently learning and implementing online marketing strategies to grow a home based business i had at the time in the travel and direct sales industry. The strategies that I learned helped me to become ranked amongst the top 3 percent of income earners in the entire company I was apart of out of 45,000 representatives.

So I started to have other home based business owners and direct sales representatives come to me wanting assistance with growing their business online and I started to take them on as clients and coach them and they started to get results as well.

At the end of 2016 after coaching so many home based business owners I decided to turn The Rise of The 1% conference call into a full fledge consulting company and community.

We signed up clients on day 1 of launching the business October 3rd 2016 and at the time we were taking on home based business owners and working with any business owners that needed help with online marketing.

Our community started growing so fast and people was getting great results so I started to have other coaches, consultants, course creators reaching out on how to grow their businesses online.

So we started to work coaches, consultants, course creators with helping them grow their business online and many of them were getting great results with our organic strategies and using paid ads and we created 10’s of thousands of dollars in success stories in our 1st year in business and we went on to generate 6 figures our 1st year in business.

After coaching for a year we felt in our program at the time we wanted to speed up the process of our clients getting results so we wanted to remove a lot of the tech work off of them in the program and setting up and managing ads.

So then we transitioned into a digital marketing agency where we built out sales funnels and we setup, ran, and managed paid ads for coaches, consultants, course creators, service based businesses, and a few e commerce businesses.

We ran our agency for about 4 years and created 100’s of thousands of dollars in success stories.

Something happened though. Around 2021 I started back doing some consulting and I launched a consulting program called “High Level” under the Rise Of The O%E and I was still running my digital marketing agency at the
same time.

I joined a high level $30k/yr mastermind with entrepreneurs who were already doing multiple 6 figures a year looking to scale to 7-8 figures+.

One of my guys who orchestrated the mastermind shared with me some strategies on how is company was doing $100k/mo without paid ads.

When I got back home from the in person event we had with the mastermind I implemented the strategies and we had one of our biggest months in business and then I started to share the strategies with my clients cause I saw how this will be a very cost efficient way for them to scale their business and remove a lot of the tech stuff and one of my clients Lashaon Brooks did $40k in sales for her coaching business in 60 days without paid ads.

Then some of my other clients started getting great results as well.
You can check out our success stories at www.riseclientsuccces.com

So I decided to shut my agency down and me and my team decided to go all in on our high level consulting program focusing on helping black entrepreneurs who were making anywhere from $2k/mo-$10k/mo pack their calendars every single week with qualified appointments and scale up to $20k-$50k/mo In under 60 days through automation and a remote commission based sales team without paid ads and the rest has been history.

Gerald, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

On the last page I share how I got into what I do.

We assist black coaches, consultants, course creators, and service based business pack their calendars with qualified appointments and scale up to $20k-$50k/mo In under 60 days through automation and with a remote commission based sales without paid ads.

A lot of other consultants out their that are serving similar markets as us all focus on using paid advertisement to help their clients scale and we have a more cost efficient way for our clients to scale in the beginning without having to blow through $1000’s of dollars to start landing clients.

Our mission is to create $1 Billion In success stories over the next 3 years or less amongst black entrepreneurs.

How did you build your audience on social media?

How I built my audience on social media and I will speak specifically on facebook because that’s where i started and that’s where I have the most engaged following.

I joined facebook groups and communities where my ideal clients was hanging out at.
When I get accepted in the groups I don’t go in there and spam.
I go in and place valuable and useful content that can help people in the group with no call to actions to do anything.
A lot of people will engage on my post and we will connect from there or they will just go over and shoot me a friend request.

Another thing I did for many years was I did direct outreach with many people in the facebook groups in messenger to build relationships and people followed me from that as well.

I also started my own facebook group and as me and my team build our community their a lot of people have followed me over the years as well.

My advice would be to grow your social presence specifically on facebook is to join groups where your ideal clients are hanging out at. Don’t go in there and spam. Share valuable content, resources, and tools.

For example if you are into Health and Wellness.
Join Health and wellness groups and you may want to post into their transformational stories, meal plans, diet plans, workout regime’s people can do, health and wellness advice etc. don’t give Call To Actions.

Connect with those people that engage on your post.

You can also build relationships with people in messenger if the group admins don’t have a problem with networking.

Any advice for growing your clientele? What’s been most effective for you?

The most effective strategy for growing our clientele has been plugging our appointment setting team into our automated outbound prospecting system on facebook and linked in.

We also use what I called the 4 E’s of social media marketing with our postings on facebook.

Enlightening/Transformational Content- This content is designed to inspire your audience.
Sometimes you can do call to actions for them to message you if they want more info on your offer or book a call with you etc. Don’t do it in every post though.

Educational Content- Value based post. Sometimes you can do call to actions. Not on every post.

Entertaining/LifeStyle Content- Show you have a sense of humor but don’t be a comedian.
You can also show lifestyle to add a human element to your page.

Engaging Content- Post content to get your audience to engage and comment on post.

Bonus: Testimonials from clients.

We also use youtube organic, email marketing, outbound dials from our CRM, and we use youtube ads and facebook ads to massively scale on the back end.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.geraldbass.com www.theriseoftheonepercent.com www.riseclientsuccess.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gbasswealthtips/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/gerald.bass1
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gerald-bass/
• Twitter: N/A
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbVpDMkR9bK0hVpxOZwHy0A/videos

Image Credits
Photos By: Antonio Milhouse Rise Of The O%E Marketing Specialist