
Written by: Laura Alomía
Inspired by the idea of serving others, Brian Golod created a revolutionary entrepreneurship that has changed the life of 300 professional from over 89 countries: Next Badge. Along with Giuseppe Sarmiento, Career Advisor of the company, both have demonstrated that an entrepreneur’s road can only be traveled successfully with passion as its fuel.
A business that was born out of passion and service
Brian Golod and Giuseppe Sarmiento have two things in common: They are both Latin Americans and were born to be entrepreneurs. However, what really brought them together to build a successful entrepreneurship, was the passion to help others achieve a common dream: landing a job in the competitive professional world.
It all started back in 2018, when Brian used to spend hours mentoring professionals worldwide to help them land their dream job. As a family man, he empathized with people that also had a family to feed and protect but, unlike him, were having trouble doing so because of their unemployment situation.
Out of his heart, Brian mentored people so that they could get a job offer, have a successful interview, and finally land the job of their dreams. “Although Next Badge is now a company, it all started with helping others to get back on their feet and advance in their careers. More than money, it has always been fulfilling to see others progress in their professional and financial lives, which also leads them to move forward in a personal way”; explains Brian.
The possibility of not only serving a community but serving humanity
The high-rate unemployment situation is not only experienced by Argentinians like Brian around Latin America; it is a worldwide problem that affects thousands of professionals that cannot land their jobs successfully in a short period of time. This is how Robert, a man from California living in South Korea, appeared in Brian’s life after nine months of being unemployed.
At this moment, Brian realized his strategy not only worked but also had the potential of trespassing the boundaries of space and helping people from all around the world. Brian states how incredible it was to “be residing in Toronto, counseling someone living in Seoul, and helping him get a job in Australia”.
By creating accessible videos, he started to offer courses that people could access at any time from any place on the planet. “This is how I learned that I could empower humans from all over the world by sharing my knowledge. It was amazing how, even while I was sleeping, someone in another continent could be learning at that moment how to land interviews and transform them into job offers”, he concluded.
Brian & Giuseppe: a new formula, a new beginning for Next Badge
Although Next Badge was advancing well, Brian still needed to transform his knowledge into a consumer-friendly format that could impact people’s minds and hearts. That is how two years ago Giuseppe Sarmiento, a Peruvian living in Canada since 2016, came into his life and helped with putting everything together in an intuitive format. What started as four-hour video courses, were transformed into bite-size videos that could be easily understood and watched.
Both entrepreneurs remember humorously how Giuseppe’s approach to Brian was very similar to the one 80% of their clients have with them: a cautious forehanded one. “When Giuseppe first reached out to me on LinkedIn, he was not sure of investing in my services. I did not push him, because that is what scammers typically do, and in a couple of months he got in touch again and we started working together”.
From this point on, Brian and Giuseppe began a process of building trust in each other, just the way they do with their clients. “Most of our LinkedIn contacts have been following us for months or even years before deciding to invest in Next Badge. However, I know how important is to build trust with our clients, I was in their shoes when I met Brian, so I can totally connect with their feelings”, states Giuseppe.
Changing the lives of unemployed professionals
Besides empathizing with their clients from a customer-view perspective, Giuseppe and Brian also share the same background with them: one where migration and seeking job opportunities abroad are involved. “We also come from a country with a difficult social and economical context and decided to eventually leave in search of job opportunities. We always tell our clients, who are 80% work immigrants: If we made it, you can also do it”.
No matter if Next Badge’s clients come from America, Asia, Africa, or Europe; Brian and Giuseppe understand their feelings: the one of uncertainty, of leaving everything behind and coming to another country without knowing what to encounter. Through this human connection, the entrepreneurs have led Next Badge to be perceived as an inspirational option that helps professionals get offers and have successful interviews that can eventually land a job.
How? Well, Next Badge as an Applicant Tracking Software (ATS) is incredibly detailed and has been tested with hundreds of job seekers showing amazing results: 98% of them get their offer at their very next interview, and the remaining 2% within their next three interviews. With this tool, Brian and Giuseppe successfully mentor executives, managers, and professionals at every level and across dozens of industries around the world that have one of these problems:
1. They cannot get job interviews.
2. They do not get job offers.
In other words, Next Badge is an end-to-end program or solution where you can acquire the tools you need to advance in your career. Moreover, the idea is to identify people’s strengths as professionals and expose them enough to jobseekers to negotiate and choose the best job, the one that brings more happiness and fulfillment.
The recommendations of two entrepreneurs
Besides, empathizing with their clients’ desires, hopes, and dreams; Brian and Giuseppe share what has been fundamental for them to build such a successful company:
1. Put all your efforts into trying to understand your client
You must see yourself as a doctor, if you don’t know what your patient is having an issue with, you cannot help them accurately. For this reason, it’s so important to care about your clients and perceive them as human beings and not just as transactions, understanding what they are going through so that the right help can be provided.
2. Do something that makes you feel passionate and serves the world
Brian remembers how when he was not trying to start a business in the beginning, He was just counseling professionals out of his heart to give back to the community. Therefore, first, it is important to connect with your idea through human values and emotions. Afterward, skills and knowledge will come as a compliment so that everything together can be transformed into a successful business.
3. Trust others & know your limits
As the founder of Next Badge, Brian knows delegating work to others can be very difficult. However, he also knows that trusting Giuseppe and German has been essential to achieving the goals of the company. Knowing your own limits and weaknesses, as well as the ones of your teammates, is important to know how to complement each other and invest in external experts that can advise you on how to develop your project correctly.
A last reflection
As entrepreneurs
of a company that has over 250.000 followers, Briand and Giuseppe agree on
what’s the most important thing on the entrepreneurship road: learning from
mistakes.
“Without our errors, we wouldn’t have wasted a lot of time, that’s true, but would
that have been worth it?” reflects Giuseppe.
Entrepreneurship
is a process of discovering how to perfect your product or service while being
in tune with your clients’ needs and desires. For this reason, both Giuseppe and Brian state
that if they could back in time, they would still do the same to gain all the
valuable learning that has enabled them to create such an effective service.
“Once you have gone
a certain path on entrepreneurship, you can either blame it or thank it. It’s
easy to blame each other on your team, to blame the decisions you have made and
the circumstances. But in this blaming game, you will only lose time and
opportunities. You cannot rewind time, so, make the most of the time you have
and learn from it until you succeed”, concludes Brian.