Influence Through Personal Branding with Isaac Mashman

Isaac Mashman3:01

Yeah, absolutely, Erin, and thank you again for the invitation to be on your show. I'm really excited because I'll be doing a lot of podcasts, essentially every single week, for the next like 36 months. So this is a good way to get the ball rolling, coming from a little bit of a hiatus. I was back home in Jacksonville, Florida when I gave that presentation, and I was trying to make the best out of it. I was like, all right, I'm not in my normal setup. I don't have the microphone. I don't have everything, but we're going to roll with it. I'm just glad that, for all the people that were in the group, there were probably a dozen of you guys, there was value, and I'm grateful for the relationship now.

So what you're talking about, what you're hinting at, is the second edition of my book, which I have, if you're watching on video, right behind me, called Personal Branding: A Manifesto on Fame and Influence. This is the second edition. I have the small, minuscule baby first edition to the left, which I don't want to talk down on too much. I published this in 2021. It was my first softball swing in the entire personal branding space. But I remember buying that book and getting my first print copies. I ordered 50 of them and I got them shipped to my place. I opened it up and I was like, man, this is exciting, but then as I read the book I realized that it could be so much better.

Now, at the time I didn't have any of my frameworks developed. I didn't have my philosophy of personal branding created. I didn't have Identity Positioning™ created, and it was very early on. It was kind of preemptive for me to even publish a book, but I thought that it would be, number one, a good way to boost my credibility, and number two, to at least get my name out there. But if we compare the two, that first edition was only 6500 words, 55 pages. I kept rereading it, kind of like an artist, I suppose, who looks at a painting and thinks about, oh, I could have added a shade here, I could have taken this out, I could have made differences and changes here.

I know the podcast, you know, I was out there, me in the name, it's like what you're putting together to get an [outlet for] output. And so between reading the lines and trying to find value that wasn't there, I started working on the second edition. It wasn't like I spent three years writing the book, but I had bursts of creative momentum. I would come up with an idea on a bike ride, I would stop, pull over to the side of the road, pull out my phone, and take down some notes. I would just jot any idea. Then at the beginning of 2024, I got serious about writing it, put all of the infrastructure in place, and [I'm] really grateful to have it released in March of 2025, earlier this year. It was quite the undertaking. It's 10 times the length and 100 times the value.

Isaac Mashman7:51

It's fascinating because you're asking me questions I've never been asked before. I love it. You're also asking questions that are very timely in terms of some of my recent realizations and conversations that I've been having. I'm normally a very logical person in terms of how I approach things, my work. I feel like we need to set the framework a little bit more into who I am and what I'm doing. My name is Isaac Mashman. I run a personal brand consultancy called Mashman Consulting Group. I got started in this entire business endeavor in 2017. Over the past, I would say, yeah, seven, eight years now, I went through a variety of different businesses, from music management, network marketing, public relations, working in dropshipping, and doing an apparel line.

Like I went through all these different things, and that wasn't in chronological order. But in every single business that I was pursuing, I wouldn't say that I ever gave any of them my best effort. That was never the case. But I did realize that there was a reason why I wasn't giving them my best effort, because I couldn't see clarity. I couldn't see a long-term path forward. It's taken me years to finally find my business. I launched Mashman Consulting Group back in 2024. Then I did a soft launch, worked with some clients, and then I started writing my book, and then I went MIA, and I had people asking if I died.

I was like, no, I'm in that, like, writing mode. I'm like, I understand how [authors] become alcoholics, because it truly is a very draining process.

Isaac Mashman9:24

I started developing my entire expertise in personal branding back when I was building my public relations firm, but at the core it was still a consultancy and I ran away from that title. But then I realized, with enough people that I served and enough people coming to me for advice, whether that be friends or whether that be strangers on the internet, that I had something there. Then I kind of leaned into that entire idea of creating frameworks and methodologies and ideas that were my own, not just because I felt like I needed to, but because of the competitive edge that it would give me. I realized that over the past eight years, Erin, I have been in this creative cycle to where I was creating more than I was building a business.

Now I'm getting into this next stage where it's like, okay, let me actually take all of these ideas and the IP and the proprietary strategies and actually build that business. That's kind of where I am now. When I was writing my book, I would definitely say that there was some, I would use the word intuitive thoughts and intuitive things happening because I'll reread this. I've been going through it again because I feel like, whenever you're writing a nonfiction book, you need to be able to quote things from your book. You need to be able to understand the order in which it's written. I almost find myself asking, how did I write this?

Genuinely. How did I write this? It was a transition point from looking for more value that wasn't on the pages. With the first edition, with the second edition, I've actually found myself wanting to expand on some of the different ideas. Sure, all of the work that went into it, I wanted to make it appear as if it was done through a traditional publisher. I wanted to reverse engineer and take, as you said, more of that cerebral approach and the more technical approach. But my book at its core is very philosophical and it's very emotional. When you frame it from that light, you realize personal branding is more than just social media dynamics and personal pages on the internet and how you appear in Google. Your personal brand is essentially you. Then from there, how you decide to position and market yourself, well, that's a strategy.

Isaac Mashman12:47

Yeah, and that's a great question. There's a particular strategy. I actually wrote a paper on it last year before my book. It was kind of the intermission piece between the first edition and the second edition. It was an academic paper called Identity Positioning™: [A Masterclass] on Personal Branding. What Identity Positioning™ is, is a personal brand strategy that kind of reels you in and expands your thinking. Why I say it like that is a lot of times you look at how people position themselves online. You have all of these coaches, these professionals, these entrepreneurs. They only talk about what they can do for the person, for their audience.

They never talk about who they actually are. But if we think about the phrase personal brand, we have the word personal on the left and then brand on the right, and you draw a line down the middle. On the right you have brand. That is all of the ways that you can make money, that you can provide value to somebody, your professional career and the professional accolades and aspects. Then on the left side, with personal, you have all of the unique personality traits about you, your quirks, your characteristics, your height, your physical appearance, your flaws, and all of the things that we tend to run away from because we feel like it will change how we are perceived online.

I think that more people need to share those personal aspects, not in a way of sharing what you're having for dinner and necessarily treating it as, my mom used to say growing up, like the Facebook mom who used to post where they're having brunch and the mimosas and all that stuff. Okay, there's some time and a place. But more so, are you a mom? Are you a mother of beautiful children? What do you enjoy doing? Prior to this call, we were talking about how you like going camping and then some of the similarities, and how I used to go, and I went to a trip up in New York and all these different things.

But that personal conversation creates rapport and that rapport is trust. When you have trust with somebody else, you're connected with them not just for what they can do for you, but with who they are. That is at the core of what Identity Positioning™ is. So I would say introducing a personal hook with your professional punchline. So my own is: addicted to coffee. I have a couple of coffees over there that I chugged prior to the interview. I'm addicted to coffee. Then the professional punchline is, I help emerging and established public figures optimize, position, and scale their personal brands. But that addicted to coffee aspect, for being as simple as it is, is a way to show that I'm a real human.

Yeah. That trust, and I wouldn't even say trust is the starting point. Connection is the starting point. Through familiarity, and the more times somebody sees me, they're going to associate coffee with me and therefore build that relationship.

Isaac Mashman16:31

Identity Positioning™, yeah. That's the entire, I included the essay in my book as well. It takes up about 25 pages of the book. But it's like nine pages if you just read it on like Figshare. I have it on a couple of different academic sites. But it is definitely a proprietary personal brand strategy. But if you think about the name Identity Positioning™, you're positioning your identity. Because a lot of times, again, who are you? That's something, now that I've published my book, I found myself asking earlier this year, because I published my book and I was like, okay, I've done this great feat. It's 376 pages, 65,000 words.

It became a bestseller in PR on Amazon. I had both versions of the book charting as the new release in the same category. I'm like, okay, this is something significant. I need to, number one, take a step back and appreciate this because I have that tendency to just overlook accomplishments. From there, asking myself those deeper questions of, even what clothes do I want to wear? What facial hair? I'm over here clean shaven and looking like a baby and I'm asking myself now, it's like, okay, am I going to be that public speaker who has facial hair on stage? Do I want to wear a hoodie?

Do I want to wear a suit? What color suit do I want to wear? Do I want it to have stripes? These are different questions that are not just about the marketability and the branding aspect, but also the identity aspect of, okay, if you're somebody who likes a certain kind of music, you incorporating that genre of music into your audio branding and how you're marketing yourself online. So there's a lot of nuance here that really ties back to who you are as an individual and the things that you choose to share or refrain from sharing from your personal life.

Isaac Mashman19:57

Well, it's interesting because I actually have, outside of the third edition, which will come out probably in 2027, and it'll be much more academic in nature, at least three other books on top of the third edition that I want to have out by 2030. Some of them are going to be co-authored with my business partner. You were talking about something with being the business owner. Building a business or company brand is entirely different than building your personal brand. There's a symbiosis that develops. But I know in the small business space, you don't see this in the corporate space, in larger businesses or cemented businesses, but a lot of small business owners, what they'll do is they'll use their company pages and speak in first person.

They'll almost view it as the same thing or have a personal page that reflects the business page. It's like, no, these are two separate entities that you're developing. I'm Isaac Mashman. My company might be named after my last name, Mashman Consulting Group. But at the same time, I am building a corporate brand. I'm building a company brand that will be bigger than me. That kind of, you have to take a step back and ask yourself, what are you trying to build? In my case, we're trying to build the number one personal brand consultancy by 2035, literally with dozens of consultants, proprietary IP, and be the consulting firm that really spearheads this entire movement forward because the personal branding space is a blue ocean opportunity.

There's a lot of people talking about personal branding, but not many people are actually diving deep and setting trends and philosophies and principles for what this new school of thought really means. Now, to go back to your question, what you're talking about really is picking and choosing what you want to share. I've been asked this question before in another speaking group and it was, well, Isaac, what do I keep private and what do I share? I talked about this in my book and I also said essentially the same thing in the group. I said that you don't want to promote things that you don't want associated with yourself.

So for example, if you're a mother and you're concerned for your children's privacy, or maybe their own independence, that you don't want them to necessarily be that front-facing view with your own personal pages, you might not say mother of three in your marketing message. You might not use that as your personal hook. You would choose triathlete or adventurer or some other interest or passion or hobby that you have as your personal hook. So understanding, number one, what you want people to think of when they think of you, what you want people to see when they go to your pages. Then long term, different things that might be points of emotional leverage.

With emotional leverage, what I mean by that, I'm not trying to come across as manipulative, but certain aspects and certain interests or facts about you are going to build more rapport, for example, the mother piece. Because if you're helping women, and you're helping them with their own identities and helping them break out and overcome different limiting beliefs, the fact that you're a mother who's also building a business is a piece of information that you probably want to share. So you have to kind of pick and choose, and I'm not saying that you have to necessarily sacrifice a whole lot, but you do have to sacrifice your privacy in certain cases and certain situations.

So a good starting point is, I would sit down and write out, and I talked about this exercise in my book, I would come up with an entire list of characteristics, interests, passions, hobbies, everything about you that other friends, like your friend group for example, will know you for. Are you the person who goes out to brunch and goes out to dinner and makes everybody laugh? Are you the quiet one? Are you the reserved one? Are you the witty one? Right, and come up with an entire list of different information about you pertaining to the person, and then from that list pick and choose what you would like to incorporate into your personal hook.

Then the professional side is much easier because if you're building a business you have something that you're providing in terms of value. Promoting the value piece is really easy. You can come across and say, I help women overcome limiting beliefs and X, Y and Z. The same way that I did my own message. So I know that was a little bit of a long-winded answer. But again, it's very emotional. It's very nuanced. But again, I think that's why my work is so unique. Well, I'm really excited to just continue.

Isaac Mashman25:43

Yeah. Yeah, well, and that's the thing, my book is, if you go through and read it, you're going to realize that I start out with philosophy more than I do strategy. Like the book has strategy, and I talk about reputation management, but it's also written chronologically. So I start out with the educational piece, which is what is personal branding. I go into the four pillar questions: what are you building your, or what are you trying to get from your personal brand, money, vanity, mission, who are you? Then a couple other ones. I talk about the laws of personal branding, and it's not until chapter four that you actually get into branding and then marketing and then reputation management.

But I feel like you have to start with the foundation, the philosophy, first, because again, a lot of times when you think about personal brand, people are only talking about social media and Google search engine result pages and all of this other stuff. Which is good, don't get me wrong, but it misses the finer details, which is what makes you freaking unique. Because if you're just talking about the strategy and like, okay, how you're positioned as an expert, is there longevity in that? Because what if another person comes along and they're more interesting than you? What if another person comes along and they have more experience than you?

They've been around longer. They've written more books. What will keep your audience connected and attracted to you compared to the next new shiny object, quote unquote, not to objectify them, but essentially that is why you have to build that emotional connection with your audience and with what you're doing. So there's security, essentially. We're really talking about security, and what you're talking about too, when you're working with these moms and with these business owners and such, and what you've already talked about with me, is I attached a significant portion of my identity to my book. Just like as a mother, I imagine, or as a father, you attach a significant portion of your identity to being a mother or to being a father.

But then it's like, okay, what about the other side of you? What about these other interests? What about these other things? So how can you balance this identity with the other aspects of your identity? It's kind of like the person who, to use a sarcastic example, is the star football player in high school. It's like they continue talking about how they threw a home run pass, you know, a touchdown, 20 years ago. It's like they attached their entire identity to their previous success, but it's like, what are you doing moving forward? Understanding that everything about you is an aspect of your identity, not just one singular part, is a huge advantage in terms of marketability and how you position yourself.

Isaac Mashman28:49

Well, we have to start with the big question of what are you trying to do. I touched on this earlier, money, mission, and vanity. I believe that those are three of life's biggest motivators, and every other motivator kind of falls underneath those three. Do you want to make more money using your personal brand, maybe charge a higher fee, grow your business, promote your business, land sponsorship deals? Do you want to do it for vanity, just because you like the feeling? You like being on stage, you enjoy the followers, you enjoy the clout. Then we have mission, which is you want to spread something forward. You're interested in philanthropy, saving the animals, or maybe even you come from a traumatic upbringing and you want to talk to other people about how you overcame some of those challenges.

You can be motivated by a mixture of all three. You can be motivated for money, vanity, and mission. So I always start by asking my clients those questions, what are you trying to get here? The second thing is where are you trying to go? How big do you want to play this? There's a hierarchy. You could be the international icon like Kim Kardashian or Donald Trump or Barack Obama or any of these massive celebrities or massive politicians, or you could be the local hero who is only known in your local city or your local area. So we have to ask, whenever I'm working with a client, it's like, where do you want to go with this?

Then we can talk about the strategy. What do you want to be known for? I talked about my book, but I'm not known primarily as being an author. I'm primarily known as being a businessman. Again, if I was to only talk about my book nonstop, 24 seven, then I'm going to, I might as well be positioning myself as J.K. Rowling, and it's like, no, I'm an author full time. No, I'm not an author full time. It is a part of what I'm doing. Then once we have those pillar, those foundational questions answered with our clients, then we can get to talking about the strategy. Okay, how are you appearing online?

Do you have an omnipresent personal brand? Are you everywhere? Okay, what is your marketing message? How are you appearing in terms of a seamless brand? Is there confusion and friction between how you're positioned on one platform versus the next? Where does your reputation stand? Are you perceived as an authority, okay? If not, what are the steps that we can take to position you as an authority? Whether that be getting into the press, launching a podcast, doing podcast interviews like I'm having with you right now. So it's very detailed, very in-depth, and very, I would almost say, invasive. Because I don't want to get the sugar-coated answer from my clients, whether they're working with me or, in the future, my COO, who I'm bringing on, or any other consultant, or even having a conversation with our AI consultant that we created, it's like we want to dive deeper on the person because then once we have that stronger connection and understanding of who they are, almost like a therapist, now we can talk about solutions and strategies.

The strategy part is honestly the easiest aspect because if it worked for one person, it probably worked for another and then another and another, right, and so it's duplicatable.

Isaac Mashman32:51

Like that's huge. Let me share a story from a recent client consultation I did. His name is Isaac J. Hall and you can follow him everywhere on social media, and he's a remarkable man. He's a pro bodybuilder, but more importantly he's a veteran and he's a health advocate.

Isaac Mashman34:39

I believe that all of those things can be leveraged for a positive result, whether that be revenue, whether that be more impact, whether that be more influence, or whether that be easier influence. By easier influence, if you have a strong story, that story is going to spread like wildfire. I remember seeing Les Brown speak. This was years ago now in Vegas at a company conference, and Les Brown started by sharing his story about how he used to stutter. Now Les Brown is known as one of the best public speakers of all time. He took his pain, used it as his advantage and a great story, and built something amazing with it.

Personal branding is not just about the strategy. The strategy is fun, don't get me wrong. But personal branding is more about the person. Understanding who they are and then how their unique selling points and their individual characteristics can really help them stand apart.

Isaac Mashman36:39

Yeah, the best way would be going to MashmanCG.com. That's the company website. Or if you'd like to personally work with me, you could just follow me on social media and send me a message there. I have to practice what I preach, so you can find me everywhere at Isaac Mashman. Very easy. Go to Google, type in my name and I'll pop up. Can't be somebody who talks about something and doesn't implement it. So yeah, and Erin, I've really thoroughly enjoyed our conversation today, and you've enabled me to dive into certain areas and certain subjects pertaining to my own work that I haven't even viewed in the same light, so it's been good.

Isaac Mashman37:43

Do the small things and they wonder why they don't have the big results. Yeah, that was the quote. Yeah. I remember afterwards I spoke with Jesse, and I was like, because Jesse, Jesse I've known him for years now. You know, being the speaker coach he is and being another public speaker, because I do do public speaking, I asked him, I was like, Jesse, what would you rate the session? I was asking him for feedback at the very end after everybody left. He's like, well, you know that quote that you said at the end? That should have been one of the earliest things that you said.

I'm like, wow, okay. That was just something, yeah, but this goes down to how technical you can be because what I did years ago is I sat down and wrote out a list of like 50 original quotes. I ran searches to make sure they weren't used anywhere. I took those quotes, got them on Goodreads, got them on different quotes websites and all this other stuff. "People get too big to do the small things and they wonder why they don't have big results" is one of those original quotes that I just pulled from. So again, when you're building your personal brand, you're creating this entire collection of IP.

You're creating this entire collection of content that you can pull from at any time, that you can continue to re-promote and repost. I believe it's a lot of fun because I like to gamify it. I like to gamify it for the dopamine, whether that be increasing the followers, increasing the influence, increasing the connection, increasing the impact. But at a certain point it becomes something where you see the fruits of your labor paying off because you have more conversations with other remarkable people. I'm grateful to say that I'm kind of at that point now and continuing to scale.

Isaac Mashman39:54

Facebook is where I spend most of my time, and ironically, Threads is also a platform that is a little bit of a hidden gem right now in terms of community engagement. My client that I was telling you about, Isaac, I connected with him on Threads, and it's Facebook's competitor to Twitter, but Twitter has become so politically driven and I don't like Twitter nearly as much as I used to. But Threads and Facebook are where I'm primarily at right now, but I'm also on Instagram and LinkedIn. But if you send me a message on LinkedIn, I will not see it and I will not reply. If you want to get in touch with me, Facebook, definitely.

Isaac Mashman41:13

But in terms of tactical advice, once you create content, you've gotten the hardest part out of the way. Creating content is the thing that takes the most time. It takes the most creative energy. But once you have that piece of content, it would be a disservice if you didn't promote it and get the most out of that content. Just ask the question. They're rhetorical. So what I would recommend you do is, anytime you're taking a short video you haven't edited, whether that be through AI or just a native video that you're posting, don't just post it on Facebook, post it on TikTok, post it on Instagram, post it on Threads, post it on LinkedIn, post it everywhere.

If you create the content that takes the most time, that's the hardest to do, take the most out of that, promote it everywhere. That's also how you can have more security in your personal brand, because imagine if the primary platform that you built your audience on disappears tomorrow, all of a sudden your reputation, your audience, and everything's up in the air, right, outside of the fact that you might have an email list. So that would just be a piece of advice that I would give, and that I would share, and that helps you create more of an omnipresent personal brand.

Isaac Mashman43:24

In Napoleon Hill's work, he talks about the master key of success. You have Charles Haanel, who did the Master Key System. You have these new thought leaders who always referred to, like, the biggest piece of advice as the Master Key. If I could create and I could promote and say the one Master Key for personal branding, it boils down to positioning. I would say that if you are not positioning yourself as a public figure, you should give up. That is the truth. In order to cut through the noise, in order to cut through the competitive landscape, in order to stand out, you have to position yourself as a public figure, as an authority figure, as somebody who's credible, as somebody who's a problem solver, as somebody who has a story.

Whatever that might look like for you, whether you're a lawyer, a stand-up comedian, a creator, a mom who does arts and crafts, you should be the very best at that. You should position that and make sure that you are being perceived as a public figure and doing things that are building your credibility, which is public trust, and putting you in a position of authority, which means that you are now somebody that people will naturally look to because you are in a higher status than them. Not higher status in terms of human rights, higher status in terms of perception, but you have to position yourself as a public figure.

If you want to exist and thrive in 2025, and I would dare say any point throughout history, you had to be positioned as somebody remarkable.