Gresham “Gresh” W. Harkless Jr. is the founder of CBNation and Blue 16 Media. CBNation is a Business to Business (B2B) Brand focusing on increasing the business success rate by providing visibility and resources for CEOs, entrepreneurs, and business owners. Blue 16 Media is a digital marketing agency providing digital marketing services including web design & SEO to small to medium-sized businesses and organizations. Connect with our guest, Gresham on Facebook, Twitter,  LinkedIn!
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Full transcript below:
Jennifer: [00:00:00] Hello, and welcome to The M Word. I’m Jennifer.
Heather: [00:00:05] and I’m Heather
Jennifer: [00:00:07] Today we’re talking to Gresham Harkless with Blue 16 Media Gresh is the founder of CB Nation and Blue 16 Media. CB nation focuses on increasing the business success rate by providing visibility and resources to CEOs, entrepreneurs, and business owners. Blue 16 media is a digital marketing agency providing web design and SEO to small to medium-sized businesses and organizations. Thanks so much for being here today, Gresh. 
Gresham: [00:00:35] Appreciate being here. Thank you, Jennifer. 
Jennifer : [00:00:37] Why don’t you start us off because I think it’s, first of all, I think I told you before we started recording, it’s intimidating having you here because you’re this awesome podcast host yourself. You’ve been doing that for quite a bit. What is this duality of businesses that you are running and how and they work? 
Gresham: [00:00:56] Well. I appreciate that, Jennifer. You’re way too. Nice. So, I definitely have to have you back [00:01:00] on the show.  You say so many nice things, but I’m at the heart of what I try to do, is I always say, and even going back to how I got started, I say I’m a journalist at heart. So I’ve always been interested in asking questions. I started a family newspaper when I was like 10 years old and that really hasn’t, left my heart and soul of what it is that I do. I was at the crossroads when I was graduating school to try to figure out how potentially you can create something that was sustainable in the journalism industry, because that industry has been completely disrupted where there aren’t really a lot of, newspapers or people that create content that stay around because they’re not able to generate revenue. So one of my big challenges was how can I. It takes something I’m passionate about and something that I do, which is, that digital marketing, building website, doing things along those ends, and maybe couple that with the ability to create content, to create something that was a sustainable and didn’t need to be like subsidized in some way. So that was something that I really had at my forefront. And, as I mentioned, even as a kid, it was something that [00:02:00] is a passion. And I think, even something I would call a gift of mine that I try to kind of couple of those things together. 
Jennifer : [00:02:07] That’s great. So how long have you been doing both of these endeavors?
Gresham: [00:02:14] Great question. I think it’s been in, my heart, for a while, but I think if we really drill down to the numbers as far as like the blog, I probably have had it for maybe about nine or 10 years, the digital marketing business I’ve had for about eight or nine years. I did a lot of the discovery, the interviews before I knew I wanted to start a business, didn’t really know exactly what that was.