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Shane Barker is an instructor for a Personal Branding -Influencer Marketing at UCLA. He has been in the influencer space for over 8 years and has been a keynote speaker at the Influencer Marketing Days Conference, Influencer Marketing Hub, and Influencer Marketing Summit Mexico.

Shane was recognized as one of the 100 Most Influential People in Influencer Marketing alongside Kim Kardashian, Gary Vaynerchuk, and legendary PR leaders like the CEO of Edelman.

He does 2-day Influencer Marketing Workshops for brands and agencies all over the nation and is a top contributor at INC, Huffington Post, Forbes, and Salesforce.

Most passionate about

• I help businesses grow offline and online. That\\u2019s what I\\u2019ve done for over 25 years and what I\\u2019m most passionate about.

Shane\\u2019s career and story

• I started working for a restaurant chain store, where I was in charge of opening up new restaurants. It was mainly taking care of the POS (Point of Sale) system. I did that for several years all over the US. That was my first part, what I call my Shane 1.0 version.
• Then I started the Shane 2.0 period, which is everything about the digital space. We build websites, my team is extremely good at SEO, we do influence marketing. I teach at UCLA about how to become an influencer.
• It has been a long journey. I used to own a bar in California. I built, with two partners, a company from a zero to $25 million valuation in two years. And I had plenty of businesses that failed in the meantime.
• You have to fail. It\\u2019s part of the business. People ask me, \\u201cWhat can I do to become successful?\\u201d and I say, \\u201cFail fast and fail hard. Fail as quickly as you can and keep doing that over and over because those lessons are invaluable.\\u201d
• The main similarity between the restaurant world and the digital world is the concept of really \\u201cwowing\\u201d people with your service and product offering. In any business, you should treat your customers beyond their expectations. This is something I did with the restaurants and it\\u2019s relevant to any customer.
• If you treat people right and you treat people well, they will come back for the business and good things will happen.

Shane\\u2019s best advice for entrepreneurs

• One of the things that I didn\\u2019t do and that today any entrepreneur can and should do is to take a mentor. My advice to any entrepreneur is to find a mentor or a consultant and ask them the questions that might otherwise take the entrepreneur six months to figure out.
• I was more of a \\u2018go-getter\\u2019; I was sure I could figure it out, I could do it on my own, no one was as good as me, and the like. I had great people around me but I needed great people who were smarter than me.
• I wasn\\u2019t asking for help. I felt like, as an entrepreneur, I should figure out everything by myself. That this was part of the journey.

Shane\\u2019s customers

• Today I have a team of 36 awesome people. We focus mainly on SAS companies\\u2014helping them with their marketing and doing a lot of SEO. We have become very good at it over the years and we help our customers\\u2019 sites get to number one as a result of leading many keywords.
• My current website has 160,000 visitors each month thanks to the knowledge we have gained over the years.
• We focus on inbound marketing. People find us through many points of contact. We use speaking events and podcasts, I write posts for the media, and much more.
• So, we are a good fit for SAS companies and anyone looking to get more exposure in the digital space.

Biggest failure with customers

• One of my biggest failures was in the company we brought from zero to $25 million in two years. And one of the things we had issues with was customer service. Although I was trying to wow the...'