Meet Ken Conklin: From Making Sandwiches To Branding Top Celebrities

Ken Conklin, who is both the branding expert behind many of today’s online celebrities and the man helping established businesses dial in their marketing, built his empire from scratch after he decided to pursue entrepreneurship at the age of 18. What originally began as daydreaming about his ambitions while making sandwiches for $8/hour has now transformed into his company, Gravel to Castle Accelerator, currently working with six and seven-figure business owners to help them create more predictability and scalability in their business.

Ken Conklin became the marketing director of a multi-million dollar property management company at the young age of 19 after getting noticed for his camera work, and he soon after used the skills he learned within working that job to begin selling marketing services online. Today, Ken can frequently be seen flying across the country to speak at business conferences to teach live audiences his most effective PR and marketing strategies, and Yahoo! Finance even named him one of the “top 20 entrepreneurs to pay attention to in 2020.” If there’s anyone who can give you some powerful advice on how you can dial in your positioning and use it to grow your business, it’s this guy.

I recently got the opportunity to pick his brain on what up-and-coming entrepreneurs need to know in order to become successful in 2020, and he gave me some pretty powerful advice that I believe everyone needs to hear. So, without further ado, here are Ken Conklin’s top three principles that he says entrepreneurs need to live and operate by this year.

The more you do, the less you wait

Ken says that if it takes a thousand hours to accomplish something, you have the choice to either spread that thousand hours throughout the duration of two months, two years, or never. Most people who don’t end up taking action in life would clearly choose the “never” option, causing them never achieve whatever it was that they wanted to, but Ken believes that the “two years” timeframe doesn’t cut it either.

“People who are serious about making progress in life need to be willing to put their head down and execute as fast as they humanly can. People limit what they can accomplish in short amounts of time simply because of the fact that they are used to seeing others move at a slow pace,” Ken told me. “When I work, my mind is in full sprint-mode. I want to knock out the task at hand as fast as I humanly can, and when I am working, nothing in the world matters to me but getting the current task at hand done.”

Some people may feel that Ken’s mentality is a bit intense, and Ken did admit that he is a bit of a workaholic, but he believes that is a necessary mentality and perspective to have if someone wants to be able to progress quickly in their life.

You set the tone for your true worth

According to Ken, it is up to each person in the marketplace to demand authority and attention. “Nobody is going to give you the time of day unless you demand that they give it to you. If you want to become somebody in your market place, then go make the world know your name.” Ken told me. “I’ve witnessed so many great services go unsold, so many life-changing products stay unknown, and so many incredible messages no be heard, and it usually was a result of a lack of importance in the eyes of that person’s prospects. When someone knows that you are someone that they should listen to, they will. And if they listen to you, you get can them to do what you tell them.”

That’s some pretty powerful stuff right there if you ask me, and I can certainly understand where he is coming from. I have seen many businesses come and go within my own career as an entrepreneur, and the ones who have been able to continuously climb up the mountain have seemed to know how to “set the tone for their true worth.”

Be willing to trade the “good” for the “great”

Ken shared with me that throughout the past few years he’s been in business, he has constantly sacrificed temporary pleasures for the possibility of gaining longterm success. “I can’t tell you how many times I have had to say ‘no’ to friends, or miss out on various parties and events just so that I could use that available time to plant seeds… Seeds that wouldn’t even sprout for years,” Ken told me. “People must be willing to let go of all the things that they currently like if they are ever going to be able to acquire the things that they will later love.”

I believe that adopting the mentality of being willing to sacrifice can be hard for a lot of people, especially when there usually is no guarantee that the sacrifice will end up paying off. Whether it is not eating that delicious looking donut that looks good at the moment but you know you’ll regret later, or not spending money on that expensive sports coat that may look cool at a party, but you know you can’t really afford, it’s important to make sure that the decisions we made right now are the ones we’ll be happy that we made later in the future.

Ken shared that the reason most people make the mistake of not sacrificing at the moment that they should is that they are not looking into the future enough. “When you have made a decision on where you are wanting to go, and you have completely committed yourself to get to that destination, everything you do begins to revolve around that journey of yours. You’ll eventually learn how to pause and analyze each situation, and determine whether or not something is a longterm benefit or longterm poison.”

I can certainly foresee the upcoming readers of this post feeling that Ken’s perspective might be a bit hardcore, for certainly not everyone needs to be willing to drastically sacrifice in order to achieve their desired success, and not everyone feels that they need to obtain a specific result immediately. However, given that Ken Conklin is doing some impressive work at just the age of 22 years old, his principles may be worth adopting into your life.

You can learn more about Ken Conklin and his company, Gravel to Castle Accelerator, here:

https://www.graveltocastle.com/

https://www.instagram.com/thekenconklin/