We recently connected with Leonard Kim and have shared our conversation below.

Leonard, appreciate you joining us today. Looking back, what’s an important lesson you learned at a prior job?

When I started working at Keck Medicine of USC, my boss wanted me to really take my time and settle into the first project. He gave me 90 days to interview all of the chairs of each department and really nail down what the main priorities were. He also wanted me to examine what we were creating and what other companies were creating. Out of all of that, I was able to thoroughly lay out a strategy, which I had to present to executive leadership. The outcome of that was being able to take a social media page from 10k to 250k followers, see web growth go from 90k monthly pageviews to 500k (800k currently), pick up an additional 2 million reads on an additional platform, 150 media syndications in places like TIME, Forbes, Sporting News, Medical Daily and more, and resulted in the company going from $900m annually to $1b annually in the duration I was there, seeing year over year growth of 25%.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

So I used to do sales, but it was really time consuming and difficult to be in front of clients all of the time. If I wasn’t happy, I couldn’t sell, which directly translated to my income earnings. I thought there had to be a better way to make the same impact in sales, reach a wider audience, and not have my mood be contingent on my earnings.

What I did was started looking for resources online to read about so I could learn more about marketing, because I heard my friend from high school, Neil Patel, was doing really good at it. So I started reading his material, CopyBlogger and other resources to really educate myself on the topic of marketing.

Then, in 2013, I was in a place where I was sick and tired of being sick and tired. I wasn’t getting any real marketing opportunities to try out what I learned (after working at a few failed startups). Yet, I thought I was good at marketing, so I took a shot at marketing myself. In 6 months, it turned into 2 million reads, 10 million in a year and a half.

Later, I started writing for Inc. Magazine, Entrepreneur Magazine and Huffington Post. Then, I picked up 300 media features across Fortune, Fast company, Inc. Magazine, Entrepreneur, CMO and more, even appearing on TV.

What I do for my clients is I help them nail down their messaging, build out landing pages so they could have clear offerings, run ads to get them traffic that converts, do SEO to help them gain more eyeballs across the web (and sometimes AI tools), and really just help them drive their businesses to where they have always envisioned it to be.

Any stories or insights that might help us understand how you’ve built such a strong reputation?

There is a unique selling proposition to each of us that draws others in. And discovering that really takes a lot of self reflection. Most people who were marketing themselves at the time I first started were talking about how great they were. But everyone was doing that. So I looked within myself.

I wasn’t great. I had nothing going on. I feel I did learn a lot of things along the way, however. So I took a humble approach of talking about everything I sucked at in life, with my impostor syndrome and just exposed what I was going through. It worked and turned into 500k followers eventually and gave me the opportunity to work with people like Paris Hilton’s husband, a VP of IoT at Cisco Systems, change management consultants, radon detectors, successful day traders, skin care founders, a matchmaker, people in the trades doing construction, landscaping, painting and so forth, and so much more.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

I feel like I don’t have resilience. One of the hardest things for me to do when I get knocked down is to get back up. I just want to hide in bed all day and just wait for my own ultimate demise. Kind of contradictory, when you kind of piece together my reputation.

However, I have a process to get back up. If I get overwhelmed or stuck, the first thing I need to do is take time to recover, or I just can’t do anything and get analysis paralysis and am stuck in life. Like moving forward for any particular task, even the simplest of them all, just feels overwhelming like I’m unable to do anything.

I look at my priorities and what I am able and unable to do. I take a step back and take a break, so I can reexamine my life. I start looking for the root cause of what made me stuck. I start doing self discovery. Then I start slowly adding things back into my schedule, so I can move forward. It’s a tough place to be in because of how rocky and tumultuous it is. And while sometimes I just want to completely give up and wither away, I just can’t. I don’t know why I can’t. Is it an obligation to be here for my mom? Is it to take care of my cat? I don’t know. It’s not like I have goals of a grandiose life. And the last thing I look for in life is fame. But no matter how much I just want to give up, I have to find a way to move forward…

Contact Info:

• Website: https://leonardkim.com
• Instagram: https://instagram.com/mrleonardkim
• Facebook: https://facebook.com/lenoardkim
• Linkedin: https://linkedin.com/in/mrleonardkim
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/mrleonardkim
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@leonardkim2610

Image Credits

Evan Duning took my photo.