Get Your Branding and Messaging on Point with Isaac Mashman

Isaac Mashman3:22

James, thanks for the invitation. You're talking about some words that I have no idea what they mean, but I'm here to jam and excited for the conversation.

Isaac Mashman4:16

Yeah, I can summarize my entire journey as the pursuit of clarity. If I had one sentence, that would be what it is. I'm from Jacksonville, Florida originally, home of the wonderful, best NFL team in the league, the Jacksonville Jaguars (two and eight right now, I'm crying inside), but I come from a single parent household. I suppose it's the same sob story a lot of entrepreneurs have, a lot of business people have. It's not that talking about it so many times makes it lose any meaning, but it's really just something that I embraced and something that made me who I am today. I know that sounds a little cliche, but growing up, my mom was a brilliant woman.

She still is a brilliant woman, but she always worked lower paying jobs. Jobs that she was really overqualified for, in terms of the intelligence that she had and the work that it was. So we're talking fast food, we're talking grocery store management, that sort of thing. I was in large part raised by my grandparents. I didn't meet my biological father and have a relationship with him until I was already an adult. He was out of the picture, and I didn't know that side of the family really well. My grandparents were a pillar piece. My grandmother raised me with the idea of working with your brain so you don't have to work with your back.

It's kind of ironic to say that, considering I'm talking to a chiropractor, but that stuck with me. I was a stellar student on track to get a full ride scholarship to FSU or UCF, and I graduated top 10 of my class with a 4.44 weighted GPA. So you can imagine the look on my guidance counselor's face when I came in to see him one day and I was like, man, I'm not going to college. This was my senior year. He's like, what do you mean? I'm like, I'm not going. Around that time I started a clothing line. It was dropshipping. That's how I made my first couple of dollars online.

It was through a store called Teespring, and [it was] called [Success Before Rest Apparel]. I put some motivational cliches on it. Prior to that, I had some entrepreneurial influences and endeavors, like doing lawn work over the summer to help fund my scouting trips and [Boy Scouts]. But it wasn't something that I really understood, and I feel like a lot of people call themselves entrepreneurs and they can't even spell the word, and they don't know what it means. It takes time to really develop that understanding and respect for being a business owner versus just being somebody unemployed with a title. That was huge. I got my start in network marketing.

I joined the industry. My first business trip was having dinner with the vice president of the company in Minneapolis, Minnesota. I took a bootleg bus from Jacksonville to New York, got picked up by my downline, who I'd never met in person, and drove out to Minneapolis with them. The vice president heard the story. Whereas a lot of people were focusing on taking photos with the Rolex, I was focused on picking his brain, and he saw that and invited us out to dinner, and that pissed off some of the upline. But it was a great experience nonetheless. Over the span of a couple of years, this was in 2017, going into 2018, I went from the industry of network marketing, got out of that, and went into podcast management.

I did some work with a mutual friend of ours and traveled to France, where I stayed for a month. From there, I went into the music space. This is really important to note, because in the music space, what I was essentially doing was being the Scooter Braun of the talent that I found. I had these ambitions of becoming my own Scooter Braun and going and scaling up not only my own personal brand, but also the personal brand of the artist that I was working with. But there was an issue with that, James. I realized that there are really no ways to make money in the music industry either, unless [number one] you go at scale, so you're in front of millions of people, or number two, you are getting the artists locked into really aggressive 360 deals where you're taking a cut of everything they make.

I didn't want to do that, and so around the time the pandemic rolled around, the artist that I was managing lost his passion, we had to cancel a concert, and I was a little lost. I knew to myself that I didn't want to do another social media agency, and that's when I stumbled into this idea of personal branding and got acclimated, or [acclimatized] rather, excuse me, and familiar with the word. Then from there, I launched my public relations firm. I was building that for a few years, dissolved it this year, and launched Mashman Consulting Group, which is my baby now, what I'm going to be scaling to nine figures and building a team of 500 consultants by 2035.

It's been a wild ride. It's taken five or six years to really compound those results. But it's really one of the most powerful industries, I believe, ever. It's something that there's a lot of information that isn't true. There's a lot of information that people have misinformation on, I suppose, with a very [short-sighted] way of thinking. I'm really excited to kind of set the industry standard and get more people to know about my space and why they should be building out their own personal brands.

Isaac Mashman10:06

Well, there's a big difference between building a brand and building a personal brand. Your personal brand is you, it's who you are. I have the philosophy that you've had your personal brand from the moment you were born. Your parents gave you your name. They nurtured you into your political beliefs and affiliations, or, ironically, what you don't agree with as an adult. They determined the God that you prayed to, your characteristics in a large part, your environment, your nature. So you've had your personal brand your entire life. But the issue is most people don't know how to leverage it. Most people don't understand that they have the greatest asset at their disposal that they can build.

Think about the movie stars we follow, Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, think about Mike Rowe from Dirty Jobs, think about Joe Biden or Donald Trump. All these people are examples of very successful personal brands. If they give their endorsement to something, it means something. It has power, it has influence, it has heat behind it. Speaking directly to the chiropractic industry, number one, there's a lot of confusion about why it's important. Is it something that's a necessity? Why should people get adjusted? The second thing is there's a lot of competition. I'm thinking about my local city of Little Rock, Arkansas.

Isaac Mashman11:25

Little Rock is a smaller city compared to Denver, New York, LA, wherever you're from. So you're thinking about the competitive advantage. If you can leverage your personal brand as the number one chiropractor in your city, it's similar to, let's think about a lawyer. If you're looking at a local level, there are probably lawyers who plaster their faces on billboards and park benches and bus stops and run advertisements. When you think about finding a lawyer for a personal injury, there are probably one or two lawyers that pop up in your head. So now I want you to think for a second, how can you be the number one person, the number one chiropractor in your local city.

Then from there, use that influence and use that awareness from your personal brand to grow your practice's brand, which is your company. So your company is an extension of you. It's an extension of your personal brand, the same way that the Chiro Hustle podcast is not James Chester, but is an extension of what James Chester has going on. Same with your speaking, same with your book, same with anything. I think having that awareness is really important. Then obviously we could dive into some of the more tactical steps.

Isaac Mashman14:22

If I could interject here, when I was speaking in Denver last month to the pond space, the water feature industry, it was an industry I never thought I'd ever work with. Similar to working with a chiropractor, one of the things that they really highlighted was, I am not able to be on the job site 24-7. I'm not always going to be the person there. So if I'm sending somebody in my place to go and work on a multiple six figure water feature for a client, and I'm not there, there has to be a degree of trust between the client and the person who is on the job site. You're thinking about scaling a chiropractic, or a practice. I'm just going to say practice so I don't stumble on my words 24 seven.

Isaac Mashman15:03

If you think about having all of these different doctors and all these different practitioners at your practice, there are going to be clients who want to come back and see that specific doctor, to see that specific person who they're building a relationship with. So even if you are not there, you might be the face, you might be the brand, the personal brand that gets them in the door. But then the relationships with those individual practitioners that they're seeing are going to be the reason they keep coming back.

Isaac Mashman15:42

Similar in the sales cycle. You're talking about sales: in order to sell somebody, you have to relate to them. They have to like you. They have to like what you have going on, and there has to be some sort of need or emotional driving force that makes them make that decision. So you can also think from a high level standpoint, if you have a practice with 10 different chiropractors, they all have their own personal brands, and the way that they're representing not only themselves, but also the practice that they're working for, is going to help establish those relationships with those patients that walk through the door.

Isaac Mashman16:59

Well, reputation management, what is your reputation? Well, it's what other people are saying about you. So it's an extension. Again, your reputation is not your personal brand, but it's tied very closely. It has a symbiotic relationship with your personal brand. So the better your reputation, the better your personal brand is going to be in terms of attracting opportunities to you. You don't want people to have questions or doubt in their mind. So if you're talking about reviews, let's just jump into this, because this is one of the easiest ways to establish your reputation from a business brand standpoint. If you have 25 negative one star reviews, it's like going to Yelp and seeing the fast food restaurant or the Chinese buffet that has one star.

It's like, yeah, this probably isn't the [joint] in the hood that I want to go eat at. But if you see a bunch of five star reviews, you're going to be like, man, I want to go to this buffet. So when you're building your own practice, every single time a client is getting a positive result from you and is going home, you should ask them and encourage them to leave you a positive review and say, hey, can you go to Google? Could you go to Yelp? Could you go to Trustpilot or whatever source of review that you're looking for? Just say a couple positive words.

Now, I want to go ahead and address this because this is something most people might not know. You cannot do a giveaway, you cannot do an incentive, you cannot give a discount to encourage somebody to do a positive review or to leave you a review. The FTC frowns on that, it's technically illegal. But what you can do is say, hey, I would love for you to leave a review. Then you, I suppose, supplement the gap. You're not incentivizing them to leave a review, but you are doing a giveaway by showing up at the local practice. [Say] you made a Facebook post, it's like best chiropractor or best practice or whatever you made the post about in Little Rock, Arkansas.

Then I went to the guy's profile and I was like, damn, he's the owner of the practice that we've gone to. That's significant, okay? But one of the things that they do, it's called Restoration Health, is they don't incentivize you for leaving a review, but they do incentivize you for referrals. So they would give a free exam and a free x-ray to anybody who you would refer. Then by making that referral, you were entered into a giveaway for whatever it was, like a gift card to one of the steak houses. So that's a really easy way for you to drive referral based business and improve your reputation, because now somebody is not just finding you on Google, they're finding you based off of another person that they know, like, and trust referring them to you.

It's just a positive thing all around. So looking for ways from a business standpoint to improve the social status of your practice is huge, in that from your personal brand, doing things like going on other people's podcasts or writing a book or writing articles. I'm sure that there are magazines in the space, the chiropractic space, that you could contribute to and talk about. So you could go and position yourself, not just as a chiropractor who went to school and has all the certifications, which already gives you a huge advantage in terms of credibility automatically, but now you're doing things that are public facing. So James, what you're doing is positioning yourself as the number one chiropractor or a top practitioner in the space, which is going to make you a lot more attractive.

So would you rather work with the average guy, the average person who, yeah, went to school, or would you rather work with the number one chiropractor who has contributed to health journals and WebMD, you know, these magazines, and has been interviewed on CNN talking about why Americans need to go ahead and get into the chiropractor? These are things that you could do at a very high level, or even on a small level and on an easy level, to stand out and improve that reputation and drive results.

Isaac Mashman22:50

Exactly, which we could talk about social media. We could talk about a website and have an effective about page that has all of the people that they're expecting to see. To go to the Google reviews one more time, and not just Google reviews, but reviews in general, I'd recommend that you consolidate all of your reviews and testimonials to one platform. The reason you want to do that is you don't, number one, want to split focus and say, hey, go leave a review on Trustpilot, go leave a review on Yelp, go leave a review on Google My Business. So have it 100% directed to Google My Business, because let's face it, Google owns what, 95% of the market?

So you need to make sure that if people are going to Google and typing in chiropractor near me, you're showing up. Now, you [said] 50 to 100 reviews. That's a really good foundation. You should aim for a thousand in time. But the more reviews you get, the higher you're going to be ranked in the search outside of sponsored posts. So yes, you could spend money and be the sponsored choice. I personally, whenever I see sponsored, I skip over it. I don't even pay attention to the [sponsored ones]. But what I do do is I go to the top choice underneath sponsored, and a lot of times they have the most reviews, the most positive interactions, and a very well managed Google My Business account, because you can go into Google My Business and post updates, you could post offers, you could post new features, new store openings, all of that.

So you could interact, and whenever somebody leaves a positive review, have somebody on your social media team, or have somebody, the secretary, go in and respond to that review and say, hey, thank you so much for coming to X, Y, and Z chiropractor. We really appreciate your business. Let us know if we can do anything. So now you're being engaging, which improves your reputation as a practice. Or what you could do as the founder, if you wanted to make this your kind of, I suppose, leg up on everybody else, you could go in and say, hey, I really appreciate you for stopping by, even if you didn't work with the person individually, and you put James Chester, comma, founder.

That shows that, hey, the person at the highest level is paying attention. That's huge. So the more reviews you have, the higher the algorithm ranks you. The same thing with social media, the more engagement you get on social media, the more likely the algorithm is going to promote you to more audiences. Well, I was just at an event this past weekend.

Isaac Mashman26:03

They're going to spend 5 to 10k hiring an agency.

Isaac Mashman27:09

Man, I'm feeling giddy because I feel like we could talk about something really impactful here for people. This is something I wanted to bring up. It's just a matter of bringing it up at the right time. What does a piece of content do? What is the outcome? Why do people engage with content? There are four main reasons. Number one, to be entertained. They want to feel good. They want to have some emotional connection built. You see this a lot with comedians, movie stars, et cetera. [Number two,] a piece of content can connect. So it connects you with the person on the other end of the screen.

Similar to [my] single parent household. Now I know an additional piece of information about you. I'm more likely to connect with you on a personal level. That's big. Then we can think about motivating and inspiring the audience, so they feel driven to take action. The final piece is education, and they're learning something new.

Isaac Mashman28:24

You as a chiropractor and you as a practitioner have the ability to create content on social media that is not only the stereotypical cracking back kind of videos that we all see, which do perform really well. But they don't do anything to position you aside from going viral. But you can educate your audience, not giving [medical] advice and saying, hey, you need to go ahead and crack your back at home doing this, and next thing you know, they're paralyzed. But you need to go ahead and say, hey, this is one of the reasons why you might be sleeping wrong: the kind of pillow you're using, the mattress that you're sleeping on.

You could go in and talk about all these targeted subjects that are pertaining to your expertise, that position you to your audience as the expert. Then if you wanted to, you could run a targeted ad using that organic content to your local market while also reaching the masses, to where now you could be the number one chiropractor in Denver, Colorado, the number one chiropractor in Miami, to where people are flying across the country or even flying across the world to work with you because they saw your video. It costs you absolutely nothing to do, and you could get your staff engaged. There are so many different ideas you could come up with.

I know that in the retirement home, they had the candy bowl. They would all contribute wafers or candies or whatever it was to this candy bowl. That is an example of a retirement home leveraging social media to drive awareness and to connect with their audience and to make it where, oh, if I want to put my grandmother, put my mom, in a retirement home, let's go with the fun one. But you guys can do the same exact thing at a very high level, go viral, connect with an audience, and even if you don't go viral, or even if you create a hundred videos, you're still creating exposure, which also translates to Google and SEO, because now you can help pop up to where if somebody was to search up your practice, they see all of this different social media content.

Now they can engage and see the staff. They can see how friendly they are. They can see their smiles. They can see this badass with tattoos, and it's helping you position yourself as not only the authority, you yourself creating content, but also your business by giving it a sense of identity. Now your business has a brand that is scaled outside of you.

Isaac Mashman33:23

Let's get you better. Building your personal brand or building your reputation is running directly parallel with what you're talking about and managing the expectation of the client experience. I don't care. It's not my job to walk through and tell you this is what you need to do to manage the expectation from a professional standpoint. My idea and my role is to help you manage the expectation from the brand standpoint and to say, hey, if you're creating all the social media content, if you're putting yourself out there as the founder, if you're engaging and doing interviews or going on the local news station or the radio station and doing an interview with people, you're answering questions before somebody ever talks to you.

Because now they don't need to ask, all right, well, who's the founder? How long have they been in business? What do they believe compared to the next guy? Why is this important? You're answering these questions for them, which also optimizes your own sales cycle, because now they can walk through the door and they're already hot. Right? They're not a cold prospect, like, I don't know if I want to work with this guy. Now they're warm, or hot in some cases, and saying, damn, I saw this guy's content on social media. I don't need to go to the next guy because I have the number one guy.

That gives you a tremendous amount of leverage, a tremendous amount of leverage to where, again, they can stay, pay, and refer. That's why you build your personal brand, so opportunities can come to you, or build your brand.

Isaac Mashman34:53

It's a form of selling from stage, similar to creating content online, but taking the time to develop a podcast and actually spend the time to do it well and to commit to it for a long term like you have. Seven years, 600 plus episodes, while the average show only gets to 20 episodes and 20 listeners, because they give up, they stop. They're like, oh, my first episode didn't go viral. I guess I'm a failure, and they give up, and that's pathetic. What you need to do is stay consistent with it for a long period of time, and what you're doing is positioning yourself as an expert, number one.

Then on top of that, you are selling from stage, and you have a tremendous amount of content that you're able to chop up and direct and use. So what you can do now is, like, this went live before we got into the conversation, I shared it to my feed, [Alexander Stevens] left a comment. So I'm leveraging my personal brand to give you exposure, and your audience is also now going to be familiar with me. So you have this great relationship and power dynamic that's going on, and it's mutual edification. What is edification? It's saying, I like this guy. I trust him enough to bring him on for a conversation.

Why did you trust me enough, James? It's because you've engaged and you've followed me for years, and we haven't really had too many one-on-one conversations, but you knew what to expect by bringing me on as a guest. So podcasting is a way for you to do that at scale.

Isaac Mashman37:05

So it took you 30 seconds to type up a post. Yep. That's how simple it needs to be. You don't need to have some super 25 page Russell Brunson click funnel to get results. Your quick call to action can be, hey, I want to be on your podcast. Hey, I want to adjust your back. You don't do that as all of your calls to action, but you throw that in there once a week. You're going to get results from it.

Isaac Mashman37:42

Well, number one, by positioning myself as a public figure in the personal branding space, it makes it to where somebody doesn't have to question if I'm an expert. So they can see that automatically. So actually, by using podcast guesting, I was on a show earlier this year. Within a month, the host made an introduction, because somebody who he was connected with in his industry, the water feature space, listened to his episode and our conversation together and said, hey, I want to have Isaac come out potentially and speak at our conference. Well, six months later, I was at the Atlantic-Oase professional conference in Denver, Colorado, speaking to the water feature space in front of amazing contractors out there.

I leveraged podcast edification for visibility that led into an actual engagement and really great relationships. So public speaking is one of the highest forms of credibility that you can develop, because by you coming out on stage, every single person in the audience isn't, I don't want to use the terminology beneath you, but they are the ones paying to be there and you're the one getting paid to be there. Huge difference. That means that you have a tremendous weight that falls on your shoulders to, number one, deliver. Because you asked me, you're like, Isaac, what's one of the things that you want to get from our conversation today?

I said tactical value, because I don't want to just be on stage and throw some strategies. I want to actually give you the keys. I want to give you everything you need to know. So public speaking is a huge part of my personal brand strategy, not just for the next 12 months where I aim to be on 24 different stages, but for the next 36 to 72 to 120 months, where I'm taking and building up my personal brand and going from that public figure in the personal branding space to a celebrity business figure who is playing the game at a very, very high level. I would recommend that if you're in the space, if you're a chiropractor, a practice owner, whatever it might be, whatever your industry, even if you're not in the space, that you consider public speaking.

If that is one of everybody's biggest fears (what's the number one biggest fear? It's not dying, it's fear of public speaking), that probably is an indicator that you should go down that path. Because if everybody else is afraid of it and you're the one person who goes in and embraces it, damn, you're going to stand out.

Isaac Mashman40:02

You can connect with me everywhere on social media. You could reach out at Isaac Mashman. I'm really easy to find. You can go to my website, isaacmashman.com, or MashmanCG.com. I run a consulting firm out of Little Rock, Arkansas, Mashman Consulting Group. Really excited, and thank you again for the invitation, James.