Justin McGill

Justin McGill is a serial entrepreneur with a heavy focus on using technology to automate sales and marketing initiatives.

After starting his entrepreneurial journey in 2008 with a digital marketing agency, he went on to found LeadFuze (a search engine for leads that helps you automate prospecting) in 2014.

Where did the idea for LeadFuze come from?

When I was running my agency, I did not want to spend my time cold calling. So I built some crawlers and methods for automatically emailing companies that I found in search results, craigslist posts, etc. But this led to a lot of info@ or contact@ type emails and I knew I needed a way to get more personal with my outreach.

What does your typical day look like and how do you make it productive?

I’m fortunate to have a team that covers the bases for what things need to get done. I spend my time primarily focusing on bigger partnerships and coming up with growth strategies. I tinker with various ideas, test them, and then determine if its something we can deploy at a larger scale or if I need to go back to the drawing board. Additionally, I spend the rest of my time focused on product improvements.

How do you bring ideas to life?

Ideas come to life through action. I’m not afraid to fail, so I usually implement things right away and test them out. I position everything as an experiment and communicate it with my team as such as well. This has helped the team adapt to inevitable change that often times would cause disruptions.

What’s one trend that excites you?

A.I. and what it can do to automate mundane tasks while allowing people to focus on higher value things.

What is one habit of yours that makes you more productive as an entrepreneur?

I’m insanely task oriented. If its not on my task list, it won’t get done. I literally have a recurring task to shower.

What advice would you give your younger self?

Get started and don’t be afraid to fail.

Tell us something that’s true that almost nobody agrees with you on.

Take a mid-day power nap! I’m a huge believer in recharging. Between getting all of my tasks into ClickUp, I can use my brain power on higher value things. I catch a power nap for about 20 minutes each day in the middle of my day so that I can power through at a high rate the second half of the day as well. Between these two things, I can ensure I always have enough juice for the bigger impact tasks and ideas.

As an entrepreneur, what is the one thing you do over and over and recommend everyone else do?

I track new site visitors, trial signups, and conversions every single day into a spreadsheet. On a monthly basis I evaluate the data to look for trends and growth opportunities. I have done this for years. You can’t improve what you don’t measure.

What is one strategy that has helped you grow your business?

A deep understanding of marketing and copywriting. Growth strategies is all I read about these days.

What is one failure you had as an entrepreneur, and how did you overcome it?

Sooooo many, it’s a little embarrassing. I’ll say not fully vetting a business idea and looking at things objectively. I have now started to look at things with a “why will this NOT work?” mindset.

What is one business idea that you’re willing to give away to our readers?

I have a whole notebook full of them, but one would be an AI based hiring process that vetted for personality type, qualifying questions, etc and could help match people to the right job for their career while also helping companies find employees that were more likely to have success in a posted role for their specific company.

What is the best $100 you recently spent? What and why?

Well just the other day I went swimming with my iPhone in my pocket and just now found out it could be saved. It cost me $100 for the repair and I literally just got the call that they were able to salvage it while doing this interview 😀

What is one piece of software or a web service that helps you be productive?

Besides LeadFuze of course, I recently switched over to ClickUp for task management and notes. After years of using Asana, I recently switched and have been a huge fan. There’s SOOO much power to it that I haven’t even begun to use it fully, but combining tasks and notes was important for me and it’s an app I use ALL the time. I have dedicated monitor space for the desktop app at all times, and it’s the most used app on my iphone.

What is the one book that you recommend our community should read and why?

Ultimate Sales Machine by the late Chet Holmes. This had a profound impact on me when I was running my digital agency as it helped me to discover how to best build a sales team and grow my business.

What is your favorite quote?

“Make it happen.” I don’t know who said it originally, but its literally the poster behind my desk and is something I find myself often telling my teenage son. It’s something I say to someone at least a 2-3 times per week in conversation.

Key Learnings:

• Use a task management app. Trying to remember everything you need to do is exhausting and wastes your energy.
• Don’t be afraid to fail, just get started and learn the hard lessons along the way.
• Take power naps to re-energize! Even when we weren’t remote and in an office, I would still get my power naps in and had no problem if others wanted to as well.
• Track your most important KPI’s on a daily basis and evaluate them on a monthly basis to look for improvement opportunities.