Isaac Mashman: Businessman, Author, Creator, Podcast Host, Private Investor, and Speaker

Isaac Mashman0:52

Mark, great. Thank you for the invitation to be here.

Isaac Mashman1:00

[Little] Rock, Arkansas, my friends. Here for the past couple of years. So where were you at before that? I was living in Bakersfield, California for a few summers, and then I'm originally from Jacksonville, Florida. I did my entrepreneur [thing], sleep on the floor, sleep on the mat, [that] kind of thing, over a couple summers, and then took a month and went over to France and came back, and then went back to Bakersfield and eventually met my now fiancée through Twitter. She was in Iraq, and so I've been here for the past three, four years and never thought I'd be in the state that most people forget about, but there's a lot to do.

Isaac Mashman1:40

I loved it, absolutely loved it. I think the cultural differences, we had a conversation in private a few weeks ago, are definitely based around life's simple things compared to the hustle culture of, let's go ahead and make billions of dollars, which I think both have plenty to offer and are great perspectives. But the fact that business is closed down at 12 PM on a Sunday, and then everybody takes the rest of the day off, or you have farmers markets where you don't only have local goods, but you have olives that are homegrown on a field, and you're able to taste wine that is directly from the source and walk through the grapevines and the vineyards and eat grapes off of the vine.

I think it was a tremendous experience. I loved it. I think that there are moments where I wish I didn't come back because of how simple it was, but I also wouldn't be where I am today if I didn't come back and return from that little hiatus.

Isaac Mashman2:43

I don't know if I would choose France specifically. Really? I think that there is a lot of unrest there, but other parts of Europe, such as Spain, absolutely, Portugal, areas like that. The French language, my brain is not wired to speak French. It's absolutely not. I tried to. I'm like, [Jean-Luc Picard], French. I do not speak French. That was like the extent of what I knew. But in terms of a Spanish-speaking country, I have a decent working knowledge, and I can learn Spanish really quick. But I do think spending part time in a different country would be good for, number one, recuperating, number two, having a new perspective compared to just limiting yourself. I mean, the majority of Americans, like 60 plus percent, never travel outside of the country, which.

Isaac Mashman4:08

[It's] a lot cheaper to travel than people think, if they were to put aside $5,000 over the span of a couple years, they could go and take a really nice trip for a week out of the country. Book a plane ticket for, like, my plane ticket one way from Los Angeles to Charles de Gaulle in Paris was 400 bucks. Oh wow. Growing up, I used to think that if you had to book a plane ticket, you're talking 12, $1,800, and I literally spent $400 for a one-way ticket. Then within a week of me deciding to come back to the States, I got a similarly priced ticket at, I think, 380 bucks.

So it's like, yeah, it's not that expensive, and especially if you have friends or you develop a network there, you don't have to spend all the money on room and board, like you would typically spend going into some high end hotel.

Isaac Mashman5:10

In the airport, so not. Okay, not technically enough to claim. I was [there long] enough to see the McDonald's in the Lisbon airport.

Isaac Mashman5:27

That'll be big in 2025. I have a speaking engagement in Denver, Colorado in October, which I'll be going to. I'm so excited about that. Past couple of years, I haven't traveled a whole lot as I was figuring out my business and focusing on what I'm trying to become, the man I'm trying to become. But next year I anticipate I'll be going all over the place and getting not only speaking engagements but just different opportunities to meet some of the wonderful people in my network that I've never met face to face yet.

Isaac Mashman5:57

It'll be, I don't remember the exact hotel name, but it's relatively close to the airport. I'll be there for two different days and be doing a training for some contractors that are actually in the aquascaping, koi pond space, outdoor water features space, which is [not] quite the typical audience I would speak to, but the beautiful thing about personal branding in my business is it applies to whatever industry or vertical that person is in and what they represent. So I'll be able to tailor that conversation there. I'm really, really excited about that.

Isaac Mashman6:35

A lot of trial and error, and I could summarize the entire process, a journey over the past six years now, as this pursuit of clarity, this understanding that, all right, this vehicle, this business isn't quite the vehicle or the opportunity I thought it was, let me try something else. I actually just made a post earlier. A lot of times people jump from business to business to business to business to business, and they never settle on that one thing. They never choose that and make that decision to build that one thing. They never see success. After going from the network marketing industry, different times, three different companies, music management, podcast management, social media, all that crap, I realized that I had a natural ability for, number one, speaking, and number two, for consulting.

I became that go-to person in my network for, hey, Isaac, what can I do to make my page better? It was so simple at the time, but when you have enough people that are coming to you for help or advice, you realize that, all right, maybe this is a, I don't want to use [it in] some spiritual sense, calling. But it is something that I could see myself building, and that led into launching the public relations firm, doing that for several years, but still at the backbone of that it was consulting. So in 2024, I launched Mashman Consulting Group, which I'm now currently building. That's my vehicle, and I can say in full confidence that I have more clarity in what I'm doing now than I've ever had in my life.

Isaac Mashman8:09

Well, by the end of next year, I want to have a team of, I haven't decided, 10 or 20 consultants. I'd much rather focus on quality versus quantity, because that's the business structure, but having a team of consultants working for MCG, Mashman Consulting Group, and then by the year 2035, casting that long term [vision]. On the Dream Catcher podcast, setting this out for 10 years from now, I want to have 500 consultants working for us and then having the number one personal brand consultancy worldwide. A consultancy like Boston Consulting Group, McKinsey, and they focus on business management and consulting at that high level for corporations.

I don't see why we can't corner the market in the personal branding space as more and more people choose to become influencers in their own definitions and becoming those public figures. So it's going to be a lot of fun. I think it's a need, especially. Yeah. As a need for moral and ethical business owners. Amen, yes. In the personal branding space or in the public relations space, there's a lot of pay to win, fake followers, egos, vanity involved. So navigating that vanity, because people will always be vain, but navigating that vanity in a way that actually has a foundation, like, all right, this is right versus this is wrong.

Yeah, you can have the followers, that's great. That doesn't mean you bought your account or paid for some backdoor Forbes article. So navigating that area in a proper way that people can be proud of, that ensures longevity, is really important to me.

Isaac Mashman9:45

Well, very easy to find. If you wanted to work with me personally, you can reach out on social media. It's Isaac Mashman everywhere. But on our website, MashmanCG.com, we have this really cool artificial intelligence bot named KPI. KPI's number one objective is to get you to watch a sales presentation that I delivered, that covers pretty much the A to Z of what we provide and what we offer. Then from there, you watch that 16-minute overview presentation, you fill out a quick onboarding survey, and then we'll reach out to you to set up a time to meet or the next steps based off of your responses on that form.

Isaac Mashman10:32

I actually just read an article on this a couple of days ago. Artificial intelligence, in my opinion, isn't this Terminator-esque, end-of-the-world game. I don't think that's the case. I don't even know. But I do believe that AI right now and how it's being executed is being done wrong. What I mean by that is, people are expecting AI to do all of the heavy lifting for them when they should view AI as almost like the spotter in the gym that is helping you lift the weights. That's encouraging you to train harder, that's helping you improve efficiency and optimize your time. So that's my perspective on AI.

So we've already implemented AI to help us write press releases, to help us write articles, to help us do research. Those different use cases have saved us a lot of time and a lot of money. Then you also have, like, video editors. So for example, my short videos, I'm able to use an AI tool and get a video edited with captions, emojis, unique music, focus zooms, all of that, in 60 seconds, when I would have paid a video editor 50 to $60 for one video six years ago. I think that more people are going to adopt AI into their personal lives as companions of sorts to help them get more results in less time.

So in terms of personal branding specifically, just seeing that compound over time and people getting results faster will be really great to watch. Yeah, it is. 60 seconds that long? Literally, I can upload video, it'll trim it, it'll do all of that within 60 seconds.

Isaac Mashman12:47

Personally, I like to work with about 10 clients a month. That is like my bread and butter because consultations are very, I suppose you could say, in-depth, and I have to take the time to actually map out and strategize them. Hey, these are the next steps you need to do. Let's say somebody wants to go and expand the distribution of their podcast. Well, I need to take a couple of hours and plan out, all right, well, these are all the places you need to get listed on. These are the things you need to do. Then also looking into what they're doing with their personal brand currently and evaluating their long-term ambitions and the driving forces.

So it's a very macroscopic approach. So I usually do consultations only three days a week, sometimes Saturdays. So Mondays, Thursdays and Fridays, I could be doing consultations every day of the week, but I want to reserve my time and make that time exclusive. Because again, Mark, working with me personally, you're paying $1,000 for a couple hours of my time. That's a significant investment, number one. Number two, that means that I have to deliver on that, it's not like I'm charging $20 for a coaching call. I'm consulting you at a very high level, so it's high quality, low quantity. I take pride in that. That also improves the quality of the people I'm working with because they respect my time.

They respect that investment and know that, hey, this is a long-term investment, this is a long-term relationship. That if Isaac says, I need to jump, I need to jump. If he says I need to do X, Y, and Z for homework, I need to make sure I execute that because I'm not going to do it for you. But I will walk with you every step of the way and do it with you.

Isaac Mashman14:19

Right now, all of my clients have been in the United States, but we have the capacity to work with people internationally. I was just having a conversation the other day with somebody out of India who could possibly be a consultant because we're expanding the consultants team. So I was thinking about how it could benefit, being able to reach other people in different time zones, because you do have to factor in time zones when you're working with somebody. But right now, all of our clients are US-based.

Isaac Mashman14:51

So I'm working on launching a new podcast before the end of the year. That'll be called Call It Excessive with Isaac Mashman. The premise of that show is every single successful person, whether you're a business owner or creator or an entertainer, you have to do something that is, in terms of the public, excessive, going to a higher level. So I'll be highlighting some of those stories. Also using the time to share some insights into personal branding, my own life, my own process. I had another podcast, Chase the Vision with Isaac Mashman, which I canceled because I felt like it was so cliché. So this new show will be two years in the making in terms of my mind and what I want it to be.

I'm working out the final kinks on the interview style and just the kind of guests. But it's going to be a little bit more exclusive on who I bring on and just having those high quality conversations with people and saying, hey, all right, you've reached this point, I want to get into the nitty gritty. I suppose where it'll stand out is the tactical advice. I want to pry in and be like, all right, you could interview me and say, Isaac, what is personal branding? I could give you an answer. But what are the steps to building your personal brand? That's an entirely different beast, but that provides the most strategic value.

Again, you think about AI. AI is able to answer a lot of the questions for you. But to actually get that strategic, tailored advice.

Isaac Mashman16:14

Do you know what it is though? Well, it's actually what I'm doing with myself.

Isaac Mashman18:30

About what your personal brand is, your personal brand is you, it's who you are. I've created a proprietary strategy called Identity Positioning™. What this is, is it takes the personal characteristics of the individual and the professional career that they have and positions them in such a way that they can develop that faithful following, because I don't want to just connect with you for being a coach. If I'm hiring a coach, I want to connect with the man. So if you were to think about your own marketing message, we would have a personal hook and then a professional sales pitch. So one of the things that we could do for your personal hook would be, [handyman] turned coach who discovered there's more to life than odd jobs.

Then you could go into the professional side, which is, I help people who feel overlooked rediscover that passion for life. So now you have a personal hook, professional marketing message. Just looking at you, for example, if you think about my own message, it is addicted to coffee and standards. Number one, I came into this interview with a couple of [coffees].

Isaac Mashman19:30

Then I say that I help emerging and established public figures optimize and scale their personal brands. So you have that personal rapport piece, that thing that establishes a connection. Then you can go and lead them into, this is what I can do for you. These people do business with who they know, like, and trust. So I am of the school of thought that you have your personal brand from the moment you were born. Your mom determined your name. Your parents, your political affiliation, where you were born, your faith, the God you prayed to, all of these different things nurtured into you these characteristics as you were growing up, which have developed you.

Were you that teacher's pet or were you the class clown? But now as professionals and as adults, we can leverage our personal brands to drive money, mission, vanity. Those are the three overarching reasons.

Isaac Mashman20:27

Well, building MCG into the number one firm, but you know, MCG is one aspect of me. It is my vehicle to other investments. So buying and investing in commercial real estate, investing in startups, being that Mark Cuban-esque figure, I suppose, [living the good life], or to use a better example, Richard Branson, who's just living that lifestyle. I do like those nicer things in life, and growing up in a single parent household, watching my mom struggle, I now realize that I don't want that. I want to go to the other side of things, the extreme, and enjoy life and be able to provide that life for my future kids.

All of my businesses are named after me. They're named after Mashman. So I want my kid in the future to be able to take pride in what his dad does and be able to have that family business, say, [I] love the old Americana style. I think it would be awesome. I think that that is what we need to get back to as a country, taking pride in our work, taking pride in what we're building. I love that.

Isaac Mashman21:30

I would vote for you. Yes. It's a, and that is a challenging perspective for me because I typically lean right fiscally in terms of money. Like, I want you to get your hand out of my pocket. I do not want to pay Uncle Sam. I don't like that. I agree. Right? One flat rate, have 10% or 15% all in. I believe that property taxes should be abolished. I don't believe that we should ever be taxed on the property we own because then that means if you don't pay it, they take your [house] away. Take your [house] away. So yes. Does ownership really exist? I would much rather adopt something like you have in Spain or Dubai where you have a stamp that, whenever you make the sale, you have a lump sum you need to pay to the government, but then you own your property.

I think that's much more efficient. We could get the money for other things, for example the roads and the schools and all that other funding. I believe that there are other avenues that could probably be explored in order to achieve that, whether that's an open fund that people donate to, whether that is a tax that might be on groceries. So you might eliminate the property tax and you might increase the tax on other goods or other items, whatever it might be. I don't care. I think that should be explored. So you asked me that. I do have very conservative fiscal policies. I would say that in previous years, I had left-leaning social things and social beliefs.

But with how far that left pendulum has swung, I would say that I'm still more middle to right in terms of social policies as well. So I wouldn't want to run necessarily as some conservative nor some liberal, but the independent gets nowhere. That's a piece of advice, actually, a representative from the state of Arkansas told me. He said, if you were to run as an independent, you get no funding, you get no access, you can [get] no marketing, no brand association. So it would have to be a sacrifice, I suppose, and a hit to ego to choose a political party.

Isaac Mashman24:41

That is a flaw in conservative states. A lot of times in conservative states, you have high taxes. Then if you were to look at the median income, the median income is lower. So in Arkansas, you have higher tax rates, and I was just telling you, a couple of minutes before we started, about how the governor reduced the income tax. She's right wing, right leaning, Sarah Huckabee Sanders. She's reduced the income tax rate by like 1.1% I believe for the highest bracket, which you don't need to make six figures to be in the highest bracket. Then she's also reduced the corporate income tax. Well, why would you do that?

Why are you taxing the big guys less? Well, you want to make it appealing for a corporation to move into the state to where they can keep their, well, their overhead as low as possible. If you're getting taxed an extra 1% off of a billion dollars, you're looking at a million dollars in extra taxes, which, how many jobs could that create off of a million dollars? You're talking 20 people that you can now employ off of that income. So now you're thinking more jobs. So you have to make your state as appealing as possible, and then also tourism, or having [transplants] from other states come into that state.

We look at Missouri or Mississippi or, in your case, Nebraska, higher income tax, lower median income. I think that's a problem and that's a flaw. I just want to agree. Again, you have less population. So where does that money come from? So yeah, you would think you might need to charge higher. But again, I think that the system that we're currently in is a system that's 100 years outdated.

Isaac Mashman26:15

Absolutely not. President, no. Other political office, possibly. The reason I say that is the president of the United States, I believe that you run for politics for two reasons. I think you cannot run without one or the other. I believe that you could run solely for vanity. Think about what kind of person would get involved with politics, career politicians especially, Pelosi, Biden, Bernie, 50 plus years. Being in politics is not supposed to be a career. You're not supposed to go in and make millions and millions of dollars. You're supposed to go in out of service. But if you were to go in out of vanity, now you have power and you can control the cards.

Why is Pelosi's portfolio exceeding every other portfolio? Obviously you have the insider information. I don't care what you say. Oh no, it's not inside. Sure, I will not believe you. So I believe there's that vanity aspect. Then the other is the genuine desire to do good. Where I fall is in both categories, and I mix them. Absolutely, there's that pride in going and being in a high position, as well as that desire to do good. Like I said a couple of minutes ago, why would you build your personal brand? Money, mission, and vanity. Those are the three main reasons. I'm not here to say that I don't have a little bit of vanity.

I [do] have a little bit of that greed. I [do] have a little bit of that. No, I'm not going to lie to you because I'd be dishonest. So I think being in a political office would be great for pride. I believe it would be great for mission. Yeah. I believe it would be great, not in terms of making money from that political office directly. But once you're a senator, you can write a book and do speaking engagements. Now, for the rest of your life, like, you're a Vietnam veteran, right? You could go around with a hat that says Senator. It might not do that.

But there are so many things, it's your credibility, it's your authority, it's your presence, it's your respect. I remember in school, we had the Lieutenant Governor of Florida come in a couple of times. It was the Lieutenant Governor, it wasn't the governor, but there was still pride in knowing, hey, he's some big shot, or meeting the mayor or meeting a district council member, it's still a representative in a high office where they had to earn those votes to get elected. So President, no, I would say Senator possibly, and I also believe I would probably start with a local office first and a local representative. Then from there, if I chose to go and make that climb, but there's a lot of transparency that is involved.

I don't like being that transparent. I have no issue sharing my life, but I don't want to have you [call] my high school girlfriend. I don't want you to have to go and dig that deep and think about, looking into trauma, looking into this, looking into, oh, he said this on a podcast in 2018. Yeah. I don't necessarily love that idea.

Isaac Mashman29:03

Radical acceptance. That's the only answer. No, I'd be. So have you ever thought about doing a TEDx?

Isaac Mashman29:12

Yes. Okay. That's one of those things that I think I'll probably knock out next year or maybe 2026. It's not a priority, but TED does have a rigorous process. So I don't even know if they have a TED talk specifically in Little Rock. I should look into bringing one here if they don't, because again, Little Rock is a large enough city, it's a capital city, it has 200,000 people, and in surrounding areas, Conway, which is about an hour north, has multiple colleges. So I think there would definitely be an appeal there. But TED, you think about why would you do a TED talk? Well, you have that exposure at scale because it's a well-established brand.

So now you can say, oh, I'm a TED speaker. So now you instantly have that credibility. So it is something I could do. I'd have to really spend more time. I can naturally go on stage and talk about personal branding for an hour. Yeah. But tailoring it and delivering a concise speech in 15 minutes is more challenging than delivering a keynote or a Q&A over an hour.

Isaac Mashman30:12

I went from dream to dream to dream. I never had that one concise [dream], like, I want to be a lawyer, I want to be a doctor. I never had that. I toyed around with the idea of going into the military, becoming a general. I toyed with the idea of NCIS, like you see, the Naval Academy. Yeah, I toyed with the idea of going into marketing, the idea of being a lawyer, but nothing really stuck, which is why in my senior year, when I was presented the opportunity of, let me go to college and get a full-ride scholarship for marketing, or what? Why would I do that versus let me find myself and explore who I am?

Some people go to college and go into drugs, sex, and money and all that stuff to figure themselves out. I just decided to go into business and take that path instead. So I never had that one firm dream, but now that I'm this businessman, I do have that dream, which has continuously developed.

Isaac Mashman31:23

Well, our primary focus is consultations. That's going to always be the primary focus of the business, offering those custom tailored consultations. We take that person, evaluate where they want to go, where they're at, what they've done, what they've accomplished, what's driving them. We provide a strategy and help them with their personal brands. On top of that, we also have a training platform which is already developed. We just have to make some tweaks to it and publish it, but it's called UnrivaledMCG. So that has a bunch of different resources and things that people can use, and every client will get access to the resource library. You can also purchase other programs.

We're going to be developing a public speaking one, a podcasting one, a self-publishing book. All those different programs that could be tailored. But Mark, I wanted to be very careful in terms of getting that published because you have to have a track record of results before you just create some course and some training platform. Like I want to make sure that this is done and it looks great. It looks very corporate, very modern at the same time. But I'm quite proud of that. It's just, it's a big money pit and time consuming pit right now. So I [haven't] prioritized it as much.

Isaac Mashman32:36

Okay. Awesome. Yep. This is Personal Branding: A Manifesto on Fame and Influence. This is a rather short read. I wrote this in 2021. I am working on the second edition, and I don't want to write some social media guide or strategies to grow your Instagram account because what works today might not work five years from now. So my book is very philosophical in approach. So I explain what your personal brand is and why you should be building it. Now, the second edition, I do lean into [that]. I'm about a hundred pages into that. It'll be probably 200 plus pages by the end. I go into reputation management strategies to build relationships.

I talk about a lot of the things I just talked about in the book, but more in depth, of, hey, these are the things that you haven't even thought about in terms of building your personal brand. That's also why I wrote an academic paper this year called Identity Positioning™, a Macroscopic View of Personal Branding. I wrote that as the intermissionary period between the first edition and second edition of my book. Really, I'm excited to take the second edition to a higher level so that I'll have no problem going on a book tour and selling copies and hitting all those accolades.

Isaac Mashman33:52

I have to say, Mark, you've asked me the best questions I've been asked this year alone. But a couple of months, not a couple of months, a couple of weeks ago, I was being interviewed on America's Small Business Network, ASBN.com. Anytime you have the four-letter acronym, ASBN, KR, whatever, it's like, oh, this is serious. Well, I applied to come on for their small business show. I got the response within 48 hours, set up an interview for the next week. Being interviewed by a classically trained journalist and reporter is entirely different than getting interviewed on a podcast. I am at complete ease having a conversation with you.

I have no issue. My blood pressure is calm, my heart rate is low, I'm chugging coffee and it's still low, and it's fine. But I have to tell you, doing those news interviews, I imagine this will continue to be the case as I do more local interviews as well, and within the next 12 months, there's no reason why you might not see me on larger news networks. But I have to say, my blood pressure spiked, my hand was shaking. Wow. That was the first time in quite some time where I've actually felt anxious doing something like this. I think there's a hierarchy to it. There's a, you can go and have an interview with the smallest podcaster, or you could have an interview on the largest news network.

You could be the local business owner, or the largest corporation. I think understanding that hierarchy, what you're playing at and the level you want to be at, is an entirely different beast in and of itself.

Isaac Mashman35:45

I would say it's really interesting to evaluate your own journey of what you've done. As an older gentleman, you went from doing odd jobs, whatever, to make ends meet. You discovered that there was more to life. You discovered faith, you discovered business, you discovered the internet, you discovered all these things. I'm not saying like, this was some caveman discovering fire, but I'm saying that this is somebody who realized that, hey, maybe there's more to life than what I've been building up until this point. You as an older gentleman have gone on to make a career for yourself in this space where most people would give up or retire.

I think that that is a testament today of what people need to do. Whether you're 60 or 70 or you're 20 or you're 15, you can take and leverage all of these tools at your disposal. There's no better time to build a business, despite maybe how difficult the economy is or despite the lack of expendable income. There is still no shortage of opportunity. I believe now you've got the politician coming out of me right now. I think that's really remarkable. I just want to say congratulations to you and thank you for the invitation to be here on the show.