3 Things That I Never Thought I Would Have to Do to Get My Business Off the Ground

I feel that the biggest difference between successful entrepreneurs and the ones who blog about their business all day (me being the latter) is not intelligence nor dedication: it's the willingness to put yourself out there via focusing on achieving a goal and doing everything possible to achieve it.

This perseverance, which eventually turns into resiliency (a key component of business success), comes about despite the fact that I would put myself in situations that were above my head, but somehow managed to swim, since I considered it my only option (another necessity for successful entrepreneurial endeavors).

With that being said, here are 5 that came to mind:

1) dot-edu links for Google ranking - Trying to figure out a cost effective way to advertise and get business to come to me when I was starting out, I began to study how Google works in order to get my website to rank higher in what are referred to as "S.E.R.P's" - a fancy acronym for how highly you rank on the first page when someone Googles a relevant term.

Part of the way that Google works is that they like other sites to reference your site via links. Google holds accredited colleges' and universities' websites in higher esteem than your average site.

Therefore, I think I called about 600 universities to get my company listed on their site, only to be approved by a mere 6. This meant that over 550 career center people deemed my expertise to be not worthy - a swimmingly good feeling.

The best was when the (large, well know public school in Pennsylvania) career center would not put me on their recruiter list even though my brother is a donor to the school which sort of stung.

a) Though, nothing compared to VA Tech who not only denied me, but completely tore apart my little company which I was so proud of.

Frustrated and wanting to prove to these people that I was just as good as the 100 other recruiting firms listed on their site, I preceded to answer a comprehensive list of 70 interviewing questions which comprised about 14 pages in Word, only for them to tell me that I was not a fit for this random list that probably nobody else looked at.

2) Teaching College - I had this odd preoccupation with how cool it would be to teach a college class without getting a MBA.

Therefore, to get the exposure, I went to the Entrepreneurship Centers of about 150 of the colleges and began cold-calling to see if they wanted guest speakers.

Frustrated that I wasn't getting anybody's attention, I eventually called one college and when the assistant to the Dean answered I told her that I disagreed with the Dean's business views (I was currently in business for about a year at the time), despite not reading them.

Bored or mad at the individual, the woman patched me through to him and I was teaching 3 college classes 3 weeks later.

3) Getting Published - When a mentor of mine, Harvey Cohen, was dying of pancreatic cancer, I had just published my first article on some little unknown site. The last time I saw Harvey, I promised him that I would get into the NY Times.

I've never been someone of too much finesse when trying to achieve really lofty goals like this because finesse doesn't get people moving.

A year later, I had the article "When You Find a Mentor Like Harvey Cohen" in the WSJ, AOL, NY Times, Business Insider, FUSE, USA Today and a bunch more.

A promise is a promise and the best takeaway from this article is that I made not only a promise to Harvey, but to myself to continue to set goals that were higher than the ones I had currently achieved and not allow my own self conscience or ego stop me.


Ken Sundheim runs KAS Placement, an executive staffing firm that Ken started in 2005.

New York City Recruitment Agency NY Headhunters

Baltimore Headhunters Baltimore Marketing Recruiters

Sales and Marketing Recruiters Executive Headhunters

Ken's articles have appeared in, among many others Forbes, NYTimes, USA Today and more.

KAS Placement is an executive recruitment agency.