The Fundamentals of Personal Branding
Host: Isaac Mashman · August 19, 2020 · Episode 36 · 29 minutes
Transcribed from the episode audio and edited to read cleanly: names and terms corrected, grammar fixed, filler words and false starts removed, punctuation added. Words in [brackets] could not be made out with certainty. Wording can differ slightly from what was said; the episode itself is the record.
Hey, what is going on, everybody? Isaac Mashman here. You are now listening to another episode of your favorite podcast, Chase the Vision with Isaac Mashman, the show whose goal is to help you guys become more capable individuals and get real results in life. You see, at the core of all success is personal growth. The more you as an individual, you as a man, you as a woman, you as a person grow, the more success you will have in business and relationships and in life in general. Far too many people live out their lives getting the same results year after year after year after year, and they don't know why.
The reason why is because they are not growing. So guys, I realize that I have a lot of information, knowledge, and experience that I can share with you guys, to save time, to help educate you, to basically help you in whatever way I possibly can.
So this is the number one spot for getting a ton of different phenomenal information and value, no strings attached, 100% free, no crazy freaking advertisements that are going to take up 20 minutes of your time, none of that stuff. Now before I do go on though, I am going to ask you guys a favor. That favor is, if you get any value, which I know you will, at the end of today's episode, share this podcast with a friend of yours or a family member or brother or sister or business partner, whoever in your life you think would benefit from the subject of today's episode. I want you guys to do this every single episode you listen to, not just a one time [thing] where you listen to all 35, 40 episodes of my show and you share it one time.
No, but guys, help me out. My goal is to help you. So if you could return the favor, show a little reciprocation and help me out, I would really be appreciative of you. So guys, today I'm going to be diving into a very specific topic. Last episode, rather, excuse me, I talked about the future of my show, the future of my content online and my image and what I was really striving for. That was episode 35. Go ahead and give that a listen if you have not already. Stop, pause this episode, come back. Go listen to that one. It's about 20 minutes long. But something that I mentioned is I'm going to be sharing specific information and everything that I know that I think would have a benefit in your life.
Anything that I have a feeling will help another person out, I want to share. I am not a believer in having conflicts of interest. I don't have a conflict of interest with sharing marketing or sales or any of that stuff. Unlike a lot of these people online who only give you some of the crumbs but don't want to give you the meat, I'm here to give you the actual substance, the substance that will fuel you, that will help you get real results. Part of me doing that is getting into some more specific subjects sometimes when it comes to branding or mindset or business. Because up until this point, I have delivered a good amount of value and a good amount of information on a variety of different subjects, but I really haven't dived into one thing and broken it down.
I've talked about going and being a leader, some things that leaders do, how to be competitive. A lot of the information was very generalized. That is going to start changing a little bit. But I don't want you to think that this is just a podcast for business owners or that this is just a podcast for entrepreneurs or visionaries or any of that. It might be called Chase the Vision, but I want you to know that you have a vision that you want to pursue and you want to achieve in your own life. That is what I'm trying to get you to realize and trying to get you to start pursuing every single day.
So today I am discussing personal branding. I'm going to be talking a little bit about my company, Mashman Ventures. I'm going to be breaking down some things that a lot of people do in personal branding, or that a lot of these online gurus tell you to do, that you really shouldn't be doing. I'm going to be telling you why, and I'm not just going to be blatantly saying something and not following it up with evidence or with substance. Okay, I don't want you to get that. But before I get into this, I want to go ahead and give you a little bit of a backstory to how I first got started in personal branding way back when.
But before I do that, even, I want to digress farther and talk about what your personal brand is. Your personal brand is you. It's yourself. It's your name. It is your image. It is what people know you as. For me, people know me as Isaac Mashman. I am a dude. My name is Isaac Mashman. I'm a visionary. I'm an entrepreneur. I'm a business owner. I'm a podcast host, I'm a brother, I'm a son, a boyfriend, whatever you want to call it.
As I progress and as I grow, my personal brand will be growing as well. It'll be changing and shifting based off of the new experiences I have. If I get married, I am now a husband. If I have kids, I am now a father. This is my personal brand. It is who you are. It is your image. A lot of times people only call a personal brand something that you have online when in reality, it is just as important online as it is offline. When you are going down the street, are you being nice to every single person you meet, every single person you shake hands with, or are you being a jerk?
Think about rumors and gossip. You watch a lot of these TV shows or you watch these old movies, like, think about The Godfather, think about Goodfellas or Casino, where one person in those crime families goes awry or does something.
Next thing you know, they're gossiping, and then the word gets around town and rumors are spread and information gets out and all these different things. That is destroying that individual's reputation. It's destroying their image. The reason why this is so important to talk about is because most people don't think it's important. How ironic is that? But the reason I think that it is so important, and not even think, I know it is important, is because if personal brand and your image wasn't important, why would there be charges for [defamation]? You can literally file a report on somebody and press charges against someone for spreading lies about your name, about your reputation, about who you are.
[Think about] people who are felons. If you ever committed a crime, I'm not saying that you're still a criminal to where you're somebody who's a bad member of society.
No, but the fact of the matter is you did something that had a permanent effect on your personal image, on your personal brand. If you're a felon, that is something that follows you. If you have done something horrible, it follows you for the rest of your life. That's why people leave the country. That's why people leave their city. Think about [6ix9ine] and his personal brand. I want to use him as an example because he's a great example to use. He ended up snitching on his previous gang, right? A lot of you are probably familiar with him. He ended up snitching and everybody's calling him a snitch, right?
And so his personal brand is not only this rainbow colored hair, you know, wannabe gangster dude. But he's also a snitch. Now he's a quote-unquote rat to the streets, right, in the rap game. Music is a big passion of mine, I really enjoy music, and so I keep up to date with a lot of the politics and all that crap.
When new music comes out, I want to know about it. So anyways, his personal image has been changing ever since he got out of prison. Even while he was in prison and updates with his court case were coming out, his personal image was shifting and changing. Personal branding is important because if it wasn't important, why would there be public relations experts? Why would there be people trying to promote your name on articles, on Forbes? Why would it be important to promote yourself on Forbes or Entrepreneur or Inc. magazine or get featured, or for celebrities who are really out of reach? What I mean by out of reach is they're super famous, they're A-list celebrities, nobody could contact them. A lot of people don't know where they live. They have security and bodyguards with them 24-7.
They have people who are public relations experts who help them build up their relationship with their fans to maintain their public image. That's why something such as a divorce or such as a scandal can affect a person so much who's in the public eye, because it is affecting their reputation. This is what it's [about]. It's reputation and attention. The attention that you have, and your actions, you combine both of those together and then you get a reputation. Attention and actions get you a reputation. Personal branding is something that I've always been very passionate about. I've always been more passionate about building up my own brands than my own business.
Three years ago, when I first got introduced to the idea of being my own boss or being self-employed or starting a business and actually being serious about it, I was a complete nobody.
I was a nobody. You searched up my name on Google. The only thing that popped up was something from ancestry.com and it wasn't even related to me. It was pertaining to some other dude who had Mashman as a last name and Isaac as a middle name. It had nothing to do with me. Fast forward three years. [I] take up five, six, seven, eight pages of Google. I'm continuously growing it. I've grown a following from zero up to 10,000 on Twitter and zero up to 1,800 on Instagram and, on Facebook, 4,000. I've started multiple podcasts. I've been on multiple shows and been interviewed. I've been featured in articles, and I'm not saying any of this to brag.
I don't want you to think that I'm bragging, but what I'm trying to impress upon you is that it is possible to go from being a nobody to a somebody in a relatively short amount of time.
I've done all of this in two and a half years. The reason why I'm doing it is because I know that the more attention I have on me, the more [I] will be able to have a positive impact on other people. The more well known I am, the more that comes from that. The more well-known I am, that means the more money I'll be able to make, because the more attention I'll have, and the more attention you have, that means that you have something that I call social equity. You have a social status. You're able to leverage that. Think about Rick Ross. If you've ever listened to Rick Ross, [you may know that] tonight, at the time of recording this, they're doing a [Verzuz] battle between Rick Ross's discography and [2 Chainz's]. They're doing a battle based off of who has the better discography.
Rick Ross is a perfect example of somebody who became famous in the public's eye and leveraged that fame to start businesses. He bought Checkers franchises, he bought Wingstop franchises, he talks about lemon pepper wings from Wingstop in a lot of his recent songs. It's promotion. He's leveraging his name and his equity status in society to benefit him financially by providing a service or a good. It's free marketing. The Rock launched a tequila called [Teremana]. It's become such a big hit just because it's The Rock's tequila, and I guess it's good. I haven't tried it. It has become sold out in a lot of stores. Conor McGregor leveraged his fame and leveraged the attention he had to start up his whiskey brand.
The Jonas Brothers did that when it came to their whiskey. [G-Eazy's] done his alcohol. A lot of these other people, think about Kylie Jenner, one of the most successful young people of our generation, has leveraged her personal name to build up a cosmetics company. Jeffree Star, a lot of these influencers that you were following are leveraging their name to benefit them financially. There's absolutely nothing wrong with doing that. So when I first got started building up a name, I really wasn't even sure what I was building, or what I was trying to come across as. I knew I was like an aspiring entrepreneur. I was a business owner. I was somebody who had a lot of different passions.
Over the past couple of years, my personal brand has evolved as I've grown. I've gotten very specific with who I am trying to be known as, what I am portraying myself as, and what business I am building and how everything relates to one another. I've made the decision, the committed decision, to blow up, to get more attention, to become more well known, because I do not see any downfall. The biggest downfall that you would have with getting attention is maybe a lack of privacy, or when you're walking down the street, somebody might come up to you and be like, yo, are you that dude who was on that YouTube video?
But in the long run, establishing a reputation for yourself and building up a personal brand for who you are will have a ton of benefits.
I went and checked my Cash App the other day and I was verified on Cash App as some public figure, and I'm like, man, I'm a normal ass dude. I am a normal ass dude, but because of the, I guess you could say, the stuff that I've portrayed myself as online, which is 100% genuine, don't get me wrong, but because of how much attention I brought to my name and how I've held myself and branded myself, Cash App recognized me as a public figure. You can get verified on Instagram by having press releases, by looking like a public figure, by having enough attention generated, by having a strong enough personal brand.
There are so many benefits to building up a personal brand. I've seen a lot of people on social media say, oh, I don't want to do that because I'm going to be sacrificing my privacy, or I don't want to do that because that means that the attention's going to be on me.
But if you're trying to be anything other than mediocre, you're going to need a level of reputation and a level of attention that you otherwise could not go without. If you're like me and you're building up a business on social media, you need as much attention and as many eyes as you can possibly get. But even then, the people on social media are playing a small game, and this is something else that I really want you guys to understand. The people who make the big bucks aren't on social media. The CEOs, the billionaires, they do not use social media. They're not relying on their social media to build their businesses.
Obviously, it's benefiting them, but think about the people who run insurance companies or health companies or health care, that you don't know who they are, yet they have more money than almost everybody on social media.
It's a different kind of game that they're playing. But if you can see the long-term vision of establishing a personal brand and a reputation for yourself and becoming well known, get the momentum going with your name and have a long 20, 30, 40 year vision with what you're doing to where you can become a household name, [then] you can go from being a nobody to being a somebody and having a long-term benefit just off of having your name on it. If Michael Jordan went broke tomorrow, he would be able to sign a box of Kleenexes with his signature with a Sharpie. That box of tissues would be going from costing $1 to being worth $10,000 just because he put his signature on it.
That is the value of having a reputation. [Take] Grant Cardone. Five, six years ago, or actually I would say 12 years ago, was when his oldest YouTube video was posted. He had a couple thousand views. He was virtually a nobody.
Fast forward, he is a somebody with over a million subscribers on YouTube, $1.7 billion in management of real estate. He's established a reputation for himself and he generates 4 million dollars every single month just off social media alone because it's able to promote his products. I went to 10X Growth Con a couple years ago, not because of what it was but because of who was going to be there. Who was I going to learn from? What mentor was I going to be taking notes from? You see what I'm getting at, guys. But the one thing that I'm encouraging all of my clients to do through Mashman Ventures is think a little bit bigger.
To have a master plan, to take a little bit of time to actually evaluate what they want out of life, what they want to be known as, and then how building up a personal brand can benefit them in the long run.
Think about being a model. Let's say you're a model who's trying to build up a name for yourself and get booked in higher paying photo shoots and magazines, like you want to be on the cover of [Cosmopolitan] or the cover of Sports Illustrated. The only way that you can demand that attention is by building that attention. You can book higher paying gigs off of the more people who know you. Think about a rapper who has 1,000 plays on Spotify. He can only charge so much for a feature or a verse, or he can't charge anything at all because people don't care enough about him. Yet Drake can charge $500,000 for a hook because of Drake and because of the amount of commotion and news and fluster that will be circulated and created based around his name.
It's almost a form of speculation. When you're looking at the stock market, you're speculating, is it going to go higher or is it going to go lower, based off of the numbers, based off of the statistics, and based off of prior economic history. It's the same way with building up a brand, speculating what will happen by being in association with a person. People who take pictures with celebrities, most of the time they don't care about the celebrity, they care about the clout that they're going to get from taking a picture with them. We [live in] a very fabricated world, guys, and I'm not saying that you should play into the fabrication and be fake, but what I am saying is this world will not be changing anytime soon. This quote fabrication will not disappear.
Learn how to thrive in society. Build up a name for being yourself, for who you are, but do not go ahead and be fake online. Don't pose in front of fake Lamborghinis or fake cars or fake jewelry. Be real and be genuine and be yourself. But also realize that by becoming well known and establishing a name for yourself, your future self will be thanking you. Here's another subject that I want to talk about when it comes to personal branding, but because this is such an in-depth topic, I could go on and even talk more about what I've already mentioned in today's episode. I want to keep this rather short.
But I'm thinking in the future, in the next couple of episodes, I want to really record an episode where I talk about how many people build up a personal brand based around a business, but not based around their personality.
I think I'll save that. But what I want you guys to get, if you get anything from today's episode, is that you need to start thinking bigger about who you are and about what you want to be known as. Start thinking about the subjects and about the topics that your parents told you not to think about. When you were raised, you were told not to talk to strangers, to be present but not seen, to listen but not speak. That's the wrong way of raising kids, in my opinion. That's the wrong way of raising kids. If I don't know you, I can't flow you. That's a phrase by Grant Cardone.
If I don't know you, I can't flow you. If nobody knows who you are or what business you build, or you're building, or what your career is, or who you are in the industry, what industry you're in, how do you expect to make any money, to make any difference, to make any impact on a significant level?
[Akon] is building his own freaking city in Africa. The more well-known you are, the more traffic and attention you can drive to topics and charities and philanthropic efforts that you care about. This isn't all just about you, you, you, you, like social media makes it out to be. On the surface it might appear like it is for you and it's just about you. But if you're a moral and ethical person, or you're somebody who is rather empathetic, I guess I could say, that would be a better term to use, empathetic, the more well known you are, the more the causes and the things you care about will benefit as well. Think about Greta Thunberg. The reason I'm using so many of these examples is to get the wheels in your head turning.
All the people I've mentioned, chances are you know who they are. There's a reason why you know who they are. They're successful. They've done something. They've stood out. They've been different. Thunberg was able to become very well known and very famous and push her message towards changing the world and making it more renewable. She was talking about climate change. I never really followed her, you know, what she was talking about or anything, but I know who she is and I know that her level of influence is massive, is absolutely massive. Donald Trump, love him or hate him. I normally don't talk about politics, but bear with me, guys.
He was able to win the 2016 election because he generated the most commotion in the media. He didn't have to be the best person who debated.
He just had to be the person who got the public's eye, who got the media and the news to talk about him. That generated attention, that generated gossip, that generated the energy that was directed around his name. [That's] why you know who he is, you know who Vladimir Putin is, you know who all these other people are. If you're not successful, nobody is going to know you. Even offline, in the real world and not even online, I believe that it's very important. This is something that a lot of people get twisted, is that they try to portray themselves on social media as somebody they're not.
I think it's very important to be the same person online as you are offline. Be open, be authentic, be yourself. But at the same time, make sure you're living up to who you say you are.
Not only for the sake of other people, but for the sake of yourself, for the sake of feeling right and having the right heart and having the right perspective on things. You won't have so much weighing down on you if you know you have nothing to hide. Think about when you were a kid. If you told a lie, you had to remember all the different details about the lie. But if you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything that didn't happen. Same thing. Exact thing. At the end of the day, the boy who cried wolf ended up getting eaten because he was lying.
They didn't know who to believe. They didn't know when he was actually telling the truth. There are lessons to be learned. I think that it's not only [about] having the same level of commitment to your offline brand and your real life brand as you have online, [but] that it is very important to be committed to who you are. I think that you don't necessarily even need social media to become well-known. You can become well-known in your city and your local government and your field of work just off of word of mouth alone. But it would serve you and it would be beneficial if you combine the power of social media and real-world application.
Those CEOs that I was telling you about earlier today, who are involved with insurance and healthcare and all that. We might not know who they are, but they have a very strong personal brand offline in their own businesses and in their own fields. You don't know who these psychiatrists are who publish papers, but they are very well known in their particular field. Now obviously if they wanted to, they could become very well known. I just find it intriguing that, I feel like, most people are prone to settling for what they really don't want. They're prone to giving in, or they're prone to looking at what everybody else has and they think that it's something that is out of reach, that is almost unobtainable.
You look at celebrities, you look at people who have successful careers and the reason you follow them is because it's seemingly as if they live a life that you can never live.
I'm here to tell you that you can live whatever life you want to live as long as you recognize the sacrifice that will be required and you follow up that knowledge and that understanding with massive action. That's what I'm working for. That's what I want you to work for. Go and pursue what you actually want. That's the goal of this show, not only to help you become a better individual and a better version of yourself, but I want you to chase after your vision. I want you to go and remember back to whenever, and I'm not a motivational speaker, fuck off. If you call me a motivational speaker, I want to sock you in the jaw. That's coming out of a place of love. But honestly, when you were a kid, let's take the artist for example.
Oh, well, you can't make money being an artist. This next paragraph of information, this sentence, is going to sum up this entire episode. Again, a focus and an emphasis on solutions, not the problem. If you're an artist, chances were you were told by your parents that you can't make a lot of money in that field, so be realistic and find something that you can make money off of. Do you really think Vincent van Gogh made money from his paintings? Pablo Picasso made a lot of money when he was alive? No. But if they were alive today with the presence of social media and being able to showcase their artwork and build up a name for themselves with today's technology, can you imagine how much money they would have made?
You can become a very well-known and renowned world painter and make as much money or as little money as you want to. You're in control of it. You're in control of how much social equity you have and how much it's worth. Don't let anybody else tell you that you can't make money doing it or that you can never be an artist, that you can never be a rapper. I'm not saying to be realistic either. Set some massive freaking goals. But I also want you to follow those dreams up with action. Action. So what a lot of people won't tell you, they'll tell you to be motivated and to go and do whatever you want to do, but they won't make you aware of what actually is going to be required in order for you to get to that place.
I know what's going to be required of me and I am willing to do whatever it takes. You got to have that attitude as well. It's all or nothing. All or nothing, baby. With that being said, I'm going to wrap up this episode and I will be doing another podcast episode very, very soon. It might even be the next episode where I talk about personal branding and how people are doing it all wrong on social media. This episode was a little bit all over the place, but there's just so much information to pack in with this. I want to get your thoughts. I want to hear your opinions.
Tweet at me at Isaac Mashman. Send me a message on social media. Let's connect. Let's have a conversation. Speaking of personal branding too, I am working with my company, Mashman Ventures, to create unrivaled personal brands for visionaries like you.
If you're trying to become well known to where somebody googles your name and you pop up, and you're ready to actually be taken serious and be an authority, to be followed, and be somebody who shows that they're about their passions and about their business and about their career, hit me up especially. Let's hop on a phone call, see if we're fit to work together and we'll go from there. That being said, guys, always chase after your vision and have an expansive mindset in everything you do.