Leveraging PR to Grow Influence and Scale Your Business

Isaac Mashman4:22

Great to connect with you. It's one of those examples of people that you're connected with on Facebook, and you might see their face around, you might see their name around. Then you get to know them and you're like, man, this is an awesome freaking individual. So man, I'm really grateful and blessed to be on the show, and you blew that bio out of the water. That's phenomenal. So thank you, man, for the kind introduction.

Isaac Mashman5:16

Yeah, man, for sure. I'm trying to build up something great. I'm trying to be well-known. I'm trying to live a great life. I'm trying to live a great lifestyle. I could start from the very beginning. I'll kind of jam through it really, really quick for the sake of time, because you could talk about your own journey for hours on end.

Isaac Mashman6:30

Yeah, man, so I was raised with the mentality of go to school, get good grades, get a job, go to college. That's exactly what I was going to do. I'm not one of those entrepreneurs who can say that I was a [D or F] student. Like, I was a straight A student. I had one C in my entire life. That was like the end of the freaking world. Like, I had to go to tutoring so I could get that C up. Other than that, man, my senior year in high school, I was going through a lot of issues. I was always that rebellious kid. This is something I really touched on.

But for me, as that straight A student, I also had that rebellious, go-against-everything mentality. I had a couple of entrepreneurial ventures, like a lawn mowing business. I had a trailer attached to the back of my bike. I covered an entire neighborhood one time with flyers. That kind of thing, but I didn't know what it was. I didn't know the actual title behind it.

Isaac Mashman7:27

It was when I was supposed to go off to college. Everybody's looking for colleges to go to. I was like, okay, well, I'm going to go to college, but for what? I bounced around from wanting to do engineering to NCIS, because I absolutely love the show, the crime investigative service of the Navy, the TV show. Then I was like, I'm going to go to college for marketing. Then I'm like, and then what? There is this thing that we're raised to go to college, but at the same time, we have no guidance as to what happens after college. They just expect us to have this golden thing of, go to college, wind up in debt, and, okay, what next?

No blame, a lot of times our parents don't know what they're doing themselves. I got involved with the industry of network marketing through [chance] on social media. I was introduced to some people. I saw some entrepreneurs really succeeding. 21-year-old kids making $10,000 a month.

Isaac Mashman8:20

Why don't I do that? Then over the span of the past three years, back in 2017 going into 2018 when I graduated, I just got into network marketing, I got out of it, got back involved with it, had some really phenomenal mentorship and experiences, and tried a bunch of different businesses. I never got far in any of the businesses. The current business I'm in is the business that I'm the farthest along in. But I recognized that I enjoyed building up brands, personal brands. Although I didn't necessarily know what I was doing, I knew that I was an entrepreneur, I put entrepreneur in the bio, but I was figuring myself out. I was figuring out my passions. I was figuring out my strengths, my weaknesses, and experiencing life.

Isaac Mashman9:03

Yeah, man, and then at the beginning of this year, I was like, man, I'm going to make personal branding, going along the lines of working with people to build up their online presence, my full-time gig.

Isaac Mashman9:41

I'm from Jacksonville, Florida. Then I ended up networking with some people out in Bakersfield, California. I was on and off in Bakersfield. It was a crazy experience, a crazy story. I'm going to highlight that in the future in my book, so I don't have to explain it every single time. But yeah, I was in Bakersfield for about 10 months, away from everybody, away from family, all my family's on the East Coast. I flew all the way to the West Coast and said, man, I'm going to figure it out. Crazy story is, I took a one-way flight out there. It was actually a round trip. I was flown out to Los Angeles for VidCon.

I left a note underneath my pillow at the time because I was [living with] my grandparents and just trying to figure things out. I left a note saying, hey, I'm not coming back. I love you guys. I hope that you respect what I did. My grandparents were supportive of it, but it was a crazy time, and I was sleeping on the floor in Bakersfield and I flew back.

Isaac Mashman12:55

Absolutely, a phenomenal question, man. Thank you for doing your research and taking the time to read all of that. I start every single training with two different subjects. I normally work with my clients and do four separate calls. That's the biggest thing I work with them on. It's four trainings, to where I have an initial call. That's where I educate them. That's where I make sure that their mindset is correct. Those are the two biggest principles. So defining personal branding is something that's very important, because most people get personal branding mixed up, they get it confused, and they have a horrible definition of it that has no grounds.

Personal branding, at the core, is who you are. You're the only Aaron Griffin that was born to your parents on the specific day at that specific time who has lived your specific life. Most people think that a personal brand is something that you have to create, when in actuality it's something that you have always had. The moment that you were born, you had a personal brand. It's just now we're putting a name to it. It's like the people who were involved with business before they knew that being an entrepreneur was who they were. It's kind of the same thing. Personal branding now, in 2021, moving forward with social media, is something that's extremely, extremely important, because more and more people are trying to become well known.

They're trying to build a business online. We saw the coronavirus, everything moved online. How are you supposed to get attention with 3 billion plus people on social media and on the internet if you don't have a personal brand? So working with a client and working with people, I like to establish a 50-50 approach. Most people want to become well known solely for what they do, [not] for who they are. My approach is I want to make you well known for who you are, take the celebrity influencer approach. I also want you to be well known for what you do. That's how you lay the foundation.

That's how you have longevity. Because oftentimes, think about a dentist on Instagram. Let's say a dentist becomes well known because he posts viral content that is of dental work. People are satisfied by seeing teeth being cleaned and fixed. So a couple years down the road, the dentist has a million followers or a couple hundred thousand on Instagram. That's his biggest platform of choice. But if he chooses to get out of dental work, what is he going to do now? Are people following him just for the content he creates or for who that man is, for who that doctor is? That's kind of my method, or methodology, excuse me, and my approach with working with clients, where they have a celebrity brand but they also have an expert brand, where they position themselves.

I like being on one platform, like there's nothing wrong with that. But the only issue that comes about is if you have one audience on one platform and that's where you're putting out all your content, let's say that platform disappears. Let's say, obviously, if you're on Facebook or Instagram, it's pretty crazy to think that they would just up and disappear overnight. But it's possible. Parler, which is a super right-wing conservative app, was literally just removed from all the app stores within the past 48 hours. The people who are only building a brand there are screwed because they don't have their brands anywhere else. To give you a real example, I was talking to this model, and she has 300,000 plus on Instagram.

She achieved virality with her content. The sex appeal side of things, a lot of people wanted to see more of her. She ended up growing an audience over the course of about four years to 300,000. She was verified. But the issue was, she was nowhere else. She was nowhere else, to where if you were to go to her Facebook, or go to Twitter, or go to Pinterest or these different social media platforms, you couldn't find her. So you're lacking that celebrity brand. The people who have the results that I truly want, that my clients want, that I imagine you want, are on multiple platforms. Now their audiences are bigger on one platform.

Kim Kardashian has more followers on Instagram than she does on Twitter or Facebook, but at the same time she has that presence there. From a credibility standpoint, what pops up when you're Googled? You can only take up so many search results if you're only on one [platform].

Isaac Mashman17:25

When I can, which is pretty much on every single social media platform and bio. Different platforms have different character limits on bios, but to use Facebook as an example, you have, I think, 101 characters for a bio. So you have very little space to put a lot of information. I always start with the who, what, where, and why. If you can cover that in a very short amount of time, in a one- or two-sentence phrase, then that's where you go. So you cover your personality. So to give you an example, are you an actress? Okay, well, if you're an actress, what are some of the things that you enjoy doing?

I was working with this one client, her name is [Donna DiGiorgio], and she's been in a couple of films. I was like, okay, so in your bio, you're not just an actress, you're [Donna DiGiorgio]. So you need to appeal to the emotional side. So you're a mother, you love coffee, you love going to the beach. You have a sense of humor. So you put that in the bio and then you say that you're an actress. So I start with that, if you can cover the who, what, when, where, and why. It's basic, just like you're writing a paper for college or something like that. If you can cover those bases and give that understanding, the other thing is professionalism.

I'm not saying that you have to be some suit and tie dressed up and have a super professional profile picture. I'm in a t-shirt right now and a backwards hat, like I'm not dressed up in a suit and tie. Now, that's part of my image. But just being professional, but also being personable, that's the biggest thing. The other thing that goes into the marketing aspect is, do people even know what you do? When I was in a transition of my business and figuring out, okay, do I want to do a public relations firm or a media agency, it was very confusing to figure out what I did and why you would want to work with me.

Then that's why I recognized, I was like, I have to define my company, my specialty, and my expertise, so it can be easy for people to understand what I do, and if I am someone who can help them achieve their goals in life. And so you also have to make it convenient and efficient, because every single time someone has to do more research on you, they're less interested.

Isaac Mashman19:40

Yeah. You look like everybody else. People get the assumption that, because there are so many people that we're connected with online that are doing big things, that are other business owners, every single person is a business owner. We fail to recognize that social media is an echo chamber for people like us, for the constant [content] we'd like to consume for what we do. The majority of people, 99% of people, are normal people who are not business owners, right? They're living their own life, and so we have to make sure that we are doing what we can to stand out. We're not just an average Joe who's working a nine to five.

There's nothing wrong with working a nine to five, don't get me wrong, or there's nothing wrong with having the name Joe, but at the same time you have to stand out if you want to get that attention. And if you're choosing to not take a couple minutes of your time to fill a space out that you could fill out, you're viewing it with the wrong perspective.

Isaac Mashman20:57

Absolutely. There are. Yeah. Well, the thing is, man, a lot of people focus only on the follower count, they don't focus on the relationships. Business is 100% about relationships. People got it so screwed up with, you know, online and with seeing the follower count. This person who has a K next to their, you know, image. And don't get me wrong, having higher numbers is important, having good engagement is important, but the way that you grow that core following and have that [long-term growth], I'm going into this with a long-term vision, with long-term success on my mind. I want to lay down a foundation that is in concrete, not in sand.

That's why it's taken me, I say that it's taken me longer than it should have taken me, and I've only been doing this for three years. But I view it from the attitude of, man, like, I should have already been farther ahead, but then I remind myself, Isaac.

Isaac Mashman21:45

So I have no issue with that. A lot of times people engage with somebody or people create content only looking to receive something in return. They're not giving. Relationships aren't built that way. They're two-sided, they're reciprocal. So to drive revenue effectively and to actually make money, you have to have relationships with people. Otherwise, it's the same thing in sales. You have a cold lead, a warm lead, and a hot lead. I don't want to have to take all of my time trying to take you from cold to hot. The entire purpose of building your personal brand and creating content and building a following is to take people from cold to warm.

So when you've been on a call with them, you're taking them from warm to hot. That's the entire point. It's to save you time, cut time frames, and to be more efficient, to where you can have a higher close rate. That's the other thing. Personal branding allows for higher closing rates because people already trust you. That's why I got my online business, a public relations firm, on the Better Business Bureau. I'll use that example. Most people don't think about getting their business on the Better Business Bureau, when, in actuality, it's free to get on. This is literally like value right here. It's free to get listed on the Better Business Bureau for your business.

It makes you stand out and you have a level of trust. I would much rather work with the company who has verification or accreditation or [five-star] reviews than the company that I can't find, or the person who I can't find, for that matter, or no testimonials.

Isaac Mashman23:38

Yeah. Absolutely. I think it's thinking outside of the box. People just don't do it. People think that. Oftentimes I've been approached, and I almost find it insulting at times, but it shows why this is a good industry to be in, a good business model to be in. People are like, so you do personal branding, so you only focus on social medias. You do, like, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Facebook. I'm like, man, I am insulted at that. Because there's more to it than just social media. It's like, are you getting on podcasts? Podcasting is a fantastic way to get free market share for yourself. It pops up on Google.

It's SEO strong. Doing this interview with you, Aaron, is going to put my name on 100 new directories that I wasn't on before, because it's now going to be associated with the Get After It podcast and Aaron Griffin. That's why it's important to write forewords in books or testimonials. You read a book, you pick up a book, you see testimonials from Forbes, Wall Street Journal, other important and notable public figures. Thinking outside of the box is the one thing that will completely change the game for business or for your personal brand. When it comes to adding an extension of your product or service that's outside of, just a separate company, you have to determine, are you trying to connect yourself to this company and be the lifeblood?

Are there some drawbacks to building up a company that's built around your personal brand? You won't be able to sell it in the future as easily. I'm not going to be able to sell Mashman Ventures to somebody who's named John Doe. I'm not going to be able to because it's attached to me. So it's like, are you going into this with a commitment, or are you going into this trying to get out in a couple of years? Those are a couple of things. Now, if you can start a business that is separate from your personal brand and entirely, it's named something entirely different, but you use your personal brand to drive traffic to that service or to that product.

Isaac Mashman25:47

Local, physical. People forget that relationship [aspect]. With the internet, a lot of times people who are building an online business only stay online. They don't go offline. If you can go offline, get involved with Rotary, get involved with the Rotaract Club for younger people. You can make connections with city council members, local leaders, local business leaders, local community leaders. You're going to be able to establish real one-on-one relationships with people. But I'm still going to shake your hand. That handshake is going to help me determine if I can trust you, if I want to work with you, or if I can't work with you. I might be 20, but I'm that old-fashioned.

I want to shake your hand and look you in the eye so I know who I'm dealing with. So personal branding is not just online, it's also offline. So going and getting your name out there in your local community, I haven't been doing that too much here because I'm only staying in Arkansas temporarily. It's like a 12-month plan, and then we're moving to Miami. That's the goal, that's the plan. But as soon as I touch down in Miami, and maybe even over the next couple of months, I'm going to start making those connections and those relationships with people who are in my surrounding areas. Then those people, because they're friends with you in real life (I say real life, but face to face), you've shaken their hand before, so they're more likely to support you and make introductions and make referrals, and you can become well known as that expert.

Isaac Mashman28:18

Yeah. So you're touching on a good point, and that's more so in the area of marketplace positioning. Are you worth listening to? If you are not showing people why they should listen to you by providing them with value and solutions to their problems, people will not take you seriously. By being on this podcast, I'm able to answer your questions, and somebody listening to this might have a question about their bio on Facebook. Now they have an answer. So they're going to view me as an authority. Because they got value from me and I solved one of their issues. I answered one of their questions. That's leadership.

That's marketplace positioning. The best way to grow leaders and to exhibit leadership is by helping other people become leaders themselves. That's the thing. When you're in a business, and especially a service-based business, with something you're doing, you're working with people to help with their book launches, those different things, you're helping them become leaders in their own right, in their own niche, in their own field, to where they can become that individual who has a book that is respected. Then outside of that, okay, so they have a book, but why should someone read the book? It's like, I want to learn from people who have the results that I want.

If you can exhibit those results and you can exhibit your experience and your knowledge, then you're exhibiting that you are a leader. We're leaders no matter what. You're a leader in your household and your family. I remember when I was in Boy Scouts, man, like, I was in Boy Scouts for most of my childhood. You know, I was holding leadership positions and my entire goal was to help other people become leaders, and even in the workforce or building up as a business owner, you need to train your people to be leaders themselves, and that's going to save you time, that's going to make the organization run better, and that's just going to make the world go around in a much better way.

The world needs more leaders. I've talked about that before. I think that was literally a podcast episode, where I was like, we need more leaders. Because leaders ultimately lead themselves. They look to others to learn from, to be mentored by, but leaders lead themselves.

Isaac Mashman31:19

Figuring out what I wanted to do. That was my biggest issue. That's always been my biggest problem. The way that I solved that, for every problem there's a solution, was just trial and error. So before I did Mashman Ventures, I was [operating] a sole proprietorship called Mashman Media, a Mashman coaching house focusing on social media. I got [Tai Lopez's] 67 Steps program, and a whole bunch of these other things. Then I was like, you know what, I'm not really enjoying this. Then I [noticed that] my friends and the people around me, they were needing help in personal branding and basic branding stuff. So I became the go-to person for branding in my friend group.

Then from there, I was like, you know what, I've been doing this for myself and I [got] results, I have success, and, like, success to an arguable point. Then I kind of recognized that more and more people needed what I could offer, what I did for myself. Other people could use that. To me, man, once you learn to a certain point, it becomes like second nature. It's unconscious competence. You literally don't even think about it. You just do it naturally, to where you fail to realize and remember that other people don't know what you know. It's the same thing with speaking a language. You expect everybody to know your language and then you go overseas and you realize that nobody speaks your language.

Or very few. So my biggest hurdle was figuring out what I wanted to do. Then afterwards, I recognized how much opportunity there was, and then, how do I stand out? I'm 20 years old. I have to position myself as that person who knows what he's talking about regardless of age. That was another challenge, a challenge that I really haven't talked about too much publicly. But all these people and all these other young kids flashing in front of Lamborghinis that they rented, or that they come from a household where their parents were wealthy and now those kids are acting wealthy as well. Like, they have it all, they give real entrepreneurs a bad rep.

It's the flashy glitz and glamour. So I was like, how do I position myself to where I'm not like that douchebag online? So where I can actually be someone who's a real dude who people.

Isaac Mashman33:36

I want to launch my book. It's going to be part one of my autobiography, launching that on the [third anniversary]. I just, okay, I'm just going to say it. I'll lay it out. I'm going to be launching my first autobiography, which is going to be basically from birth to where I'm at in 2020, the end of 2020. That's going to be launched on the third-year anniversary of my graduation date. Then I want to speak on stage in front of a thousand people, Lord willing, by the end of this year, if we can go back to normal and go back to doing events and eating at restaurants and that kind of thing.

Then the final goal is, currently with my business model working with clientele, I have to take a lot of one-on-one time. And the entire point of running a business is to save you time. I'm going to be working on a very, very intensive course, an actual training program that's like legit, that's going to cover value, not one of those Shopify courses that's going to teach you how to make a million dollars. All you have to do is buy my course. But I'm going to be working on a course and publishing that by the end of the year as well.

Isaac Mashman35:04

Absolutely love that. Mentorship is not something that I really had too much in my own life. Like when I was in Boy Scouts, I looked up to my scout leaders and all those people. At the time, I didn't realize that that was actually mentorship, but it was. But getting involved with business and getting into this next stage and chapter of my life, network marketing was the one thing that really pointed my eyes towards mentorship and defined what it was. Even then, I was very picky with who I listened to. In order for me to find a mentor or to listen to a mentor and actually digest what they say and what they tell me, they have to have the results in the area that they're teaching me on.

I was never that guy who listened to the person making a couple thousand dollars a month. I was that cocky guy who was like, I want to learn from the person making five hundred thousand dollars a month, because what you don't realize is all the information that we're sharing, or that mentors teach you, is regurgitated. They learned it from somebody who learned it from somebody who learned it from somebody. It's like you play that game of telephone. You start off with the message and by the end the message is entirely different. I want to go up the line as quickly as possible, or as far up as possible, rather, to where I know the person who's telling me something knows what they're talking about.

They have the experience. I've gotten 99% of my mentorship online through YouTube, through books. I have books over there. Recently, I just took the books out of my office, but you know, I have The 10X Rule by Grant Cardone. I have Getting to Yes, which is a book on negotiations. I have 475 Tax Deductions. I'm learning from these different people who have the results that I want. People don't have to go and find somebody locally or reach out to somebody online to learn from them. Like, there's a lot of free content online that these mentors that we would otherwise want to work with have produced that we can learn from.

The beautiful thing is, man, I'm big on self-development and that's the core of my podcast. It's growing as an individual. It's personal growth, because if I'm able to save time, then I'm able to live my life in a more efficient, in a better manner. That's the entire point, I think, of finding mentors. I don't want to take the same 20 years to learn something that I could learn in 30 minutes.

Isaac Mashman37:55

Aaron, my man, thank you again. It's an absolute honor, and thank you guys for tuning in live. I appreciate that, because just like I'm volunteering time and you're volunteering time, you're also volunteering time watching this. So thank you. You can find me literally everywhere. isaacmashman.com is a good place to start. If you're interested in personal development, I actually have a document up there for free that you can download highlighting all the personal development choices that I got. You can follow me on Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and send me a friend request. Yeah, you can find me everywhere. If you want to work with me and learn a little bit more about what I can do to help you, shoot me a message.

Send me a text. My phone number is all over the web. I make it very easy to get access to me. I appreciate the opportunity, Aaron, most definitely.