Building a Personal Brand

Isaac Mashman0:00

Well, I think one, if you're thinking about authenticity, you're being inauthentic because you're trying to manipulate what you are or aren't putting out. So don't focus on authenticity. Everybody says be authentic and nobody explains what that means. That means you're being inauthentic.

Isaac Mashman1:09

Paul, pleasure to be here, man. [I am] excited for this conversation.

Isaac Mashman1:56

I am from Jacksonville, Florida. I was born into a single-parent household. I never met my biological father. We [didn't] connect until later in life. Thankfully, today I have a great relationship with him.

Isaac Mashman2:22

I was raised in large part by my grandparents. My grandmother pretty much stayed at home taking care of me. My mom would help support some of the bills, and she'd raise me and drop me off at school. Grandfather was a carpenter. Used to build cabinets. So I remember getting up at 5 o'clock and taking him across the river with my grandmother to drop him off at the cabinet shop and pick him up after school.

Isaac Mashman2:51

Now, I'm very grateful for the way that I was raised. It taught me that there's something else out there. This is what I don't like. I love sloppy joes, but that doesn't mean I want to eat sloppy joes as an adult and feed them to my kids when they're later down the road. But I'm also not one of those [D and F] students, Paul. I'm not one of those entrepreneurs. It's like, I started because I sucked at school. No, I excelled at school. I was top 10, high GPA, AP classes, one SAT test away from a [full-ride] scholarship to FSU. I got accepted into both UCF and FSU. Screw the Florida Gators, they didn't accept me.

Isaac Mashman3:42

I'm thinking to myself, why would I go to college and get a marketing degree? My mom has a master's and hasn't put it to use yet. I'm thinking to myself, that just doesn't make sense. So I started a clothing line. I had these entrepreneurial facets that I didn't know were entrepreneurial spirit. My stepdad and stepbrother encouraged me to do like lawn care one summer. I did lawn [care for] a law firm and did work for Boy Scouts and things of that nature.

Isaac Mashman5:54

Well, I did work two jobs in my life. One was at a [Publix] grocery store as an overnight stock, stock boy for about three months, and I would blast Andy Frisella's MFCEO Project in my ear. I used to [tick] the boss off because I'd always have something in my ear listening to him, and he'd be talking to me and I'm like, huh? Because I was focused on personal value, and why not get the most out of it. I'm not going to listen to the same playlist of 2000s hits over and over again at night. No, I worked at a barbecue joint, but after I got out of network marketing, I tried my hand at drop shipping, wanting to do some social media work and some podcast management.

Isaac Mashman6:57

Yeah. I was in California at the time because I pretty much graduated, and there was a moment where I was flown out to California for VidCon by Facebook in 2019. Everybody knows about Facebook Reels, but they don't know about the precursor to Reels. It was called Lasso, like the lasso, the rope, and it was an app that was short videos, under a minute. I think it was under 30 seconds. I worked my way into [becoming] one of the star creators, and I was flown out to LA for VidCon in 2019, and rather than flying home, I stayed in California. I spent the summer in Bakersfield with people that I met the year before when I was out there.

But those risks, I suppose the big thing in my mind was, what's the worst that could happen? What's the worst that could happen? Why not? Yeah, man, I could go into a million different directions there.

Isaac Mashman8:15

I made a great employee, which is the ironic part. Just like I was a straight-A student, I was an excellent employee. I know that if I was to choose a marketing career, or choose to work a business or a nine to five, I would have excelled at it. I found that building a business is more challenging, though, simply because you lack that structure and you need that discipline to do it to yourself. That's been like the biggest [thing], moving into this next stage, having the discipline to get up when I need to get up and do the things that I need to do, because it's not like you have a boss who's saying [what to do].

In school, I performed very well. I remember in PE, and I was thinking about this, in ninth grade I was the fat, chubby kid. I remember my grades being paralleled by how fast I could run the mile. When I started the year, it was like 11 minutes, it was horrible. By the end of the year, I'd worked it down to eight minutes and 20 seconds, and I got an A in the class. But I realized looking back in retrospect that the reason I was able to do that was I had a milestone. This expectation that if I didn't meet it, I would get a B on my report card, and why am I going to be a straight A student in every class and then have a B in PE? Like, that's pathetic.

Isaac Mashman9:31

Then I was there as a dishwasher for like three days, and the boss moved me into the back to work with food prep. He's like, you're overqualified, get back here. Like, literally, and I didn't have a choice. I was like, okay, sure. That's why my story, and why I don't talk about these things, is atypical to what most entrepreneurs talk about in their own journeys and their own progressions. Yeah.

Isaac Mashman10:06

That would have to be the podcast management, because when I was building all these different side hustles and endeavors, what I was doing was building out my personal brand, because I understood early on that obscurity is the enemy of success. Like I have to make sure that people know me. So some of the people that have been connected with me the longest have seen me go through five different pivots and they've seen, okay, after six months, let's change this up. After six months, let's change this up. It always pissed me off when I did that because I'm like, man, I [stink] this time. But at the same point, I feel like there's something else.

It was this pursuit of clarity almost. Like I was seeking something that I could naturally be good at, but when I was in California, I had the friend group that I had at the time, and a lot of them were coming to me asking for help with their social media, with their pages, with their business pages. I realized that there was this wide open opportunity to work with the personal brands rather than the businesses. Cause everybody works with the business to run leads and run ads. But what about the business owner? What about the entertainer? So that was in 2019 when the seed was planted.

That's when I moved into the music industry a little bit, managed musical talent because branding and marketing tied great in to music management and positioning artists, and eventually got out of that.

Isaac Mashman11:37

I wouldn't say natural talent, but I would say reverse engineering everything. Like that's the big secret. If people think about how they can build a brand or build a business or run a successful ad, there are people online that charge thousands of dollars for reverse engineering click funnels and reverse engineering a funnel page. It's like, right, you're seeing what works and adopting it. That's what I did. So what I would do is when I was in high school, I remember sitting behind my desk during my free period, my senior year, and watching Gary Vaynerchuk's videos and editing my podcast and everything else. I'm not a fan of Gary today in large part.

I don't have anything bad to say about the guy. Just I feel like you graduate from Gary V and go into like high level, tactical stuff. I feel like he's the introductory course until like the gourmet meal. But I reverse engineered what Gary did, what Tai Lopez did, how Grant Cardone positioned himself, because he went from being this obscure sales trainer to being well known in a matter of a decade. So I would look and I'd run Google searches and I would see what blogs they got on, how they built their podcast, where the podcast was distributed, what those little details were, how their social media looked.

For example, if I'm going to want to do public speaking, how do I get on the bureaus that they're listed on? I just looked for all of those different avenues that I could go down. Eventually I figured out, okay, this works, this doesn't work. Let me go ahead and do this. Then this is also duplicatable for clients. That's where I started to really pinpoint the strategy, so that I could take anybody, look at what they've done, look at what they're wanting to do, and position them to where they could be that public figure and get in front of whatever audience they want.

Isaac Mashman13:48

Because it's everything. Regardless of you being on social media or not, you have a personal brand. This is one of the biggest misconceptions people have. They think that their personal brand only exists on Instagram, or that because they're creating a new website, they're creating a new personal brand, or that if they're pivoting, they have to create a new one. No, you are working with the same personal brand you have had from the moment your mom pushed you out all those years ago. That's the thing that people need to understand. As you go through, just like I was the straight A student, I have friends from my past that know me, or that I forgot about, or that forgot about me.

I know people from my past that I have perceptions about. We all have perceptions as children and then we go and get older and you go to college and you land a career. How do you land a career? With a resume, and what is a resume but a reflection of your personal brand? So I realized that there's this philosophical approach in 2024 that needs to be preached more than ever because if the internet disappeared tomorrow, you could still go outside and shake hands and people will know you in your local community. You'd still be known, and your mother, your son, your daughter, your aunts, your uncles, your friends, they still know you. That is your personal brand. It is you.

Isaac Mashman15:01

It's not just one thing. It's a spiderweb of everything. So your reputation is not your personal brand, it is separate. It is an aspect of your personal brand, whether that's for good or for bad. Your book is an aspect of your personal brand. Your interests and hobbies are an aspect of your personal brand. There is literally nothing that I could say that isn't a part of your personal brand aside from your actual company brand. Your company is an extension of you, but it is not you. This is something small business owners really screw up with. They use their business pages as their personal pages. They use I instead of we or our, first person versus third person.

That's not your personal brand. But every single thing, just like you have Superman in the background and whole comic books on your wall, which I see, your interest in Marvel or DC is a part of your personal brand, just like me drinking coffee is a part of it. This hyper fixation on only showing the professional side is hurting people because it's not allowing them to get connected on an emotional basis and have rapport established.

Isaac Mashman16:33

Well, there are three main reasons why you would build your personal brand, and pretty much every other small micro reason falls underneath these three. You have the ability to make money and generate revenue. You have vanity and ego. And then you have to drive awareness to a cause. Those are the three biggest reasons, and everything else can fall underneath them. Those are like the umbrella reasons. So by building out your personal brand and being positioned as an expert, you're able to grow your company's brand. You're able to say, oh no, I'm associated with this. Or, you know, I would automatically choose you over the next designer because I've seen your work.

I've connected with you as a person. People do business with who they know, like, and trust. This isn't new. Now, you can also build your personal brand because maybe you just like the attention. I think that there's nothing innately wrong with that. I'm not here to dispute the morals or the ethical ramifications of being famous, but having that desire to be well known is, I mean, all entertainers have that narcissism. I mean, you think about entertainers, the reason they grow is not just for money, it's for vanity. Then you have the alternative side, which is like a mission. You want to drive awareness to a cause.

Maybe you have something that you care about, something that is close to your heart, whether that's how to improve businesses, or cyber security because you hacked into a system 20 years ago.

Isaac Mashman18:04

Those are the main reasons why you build your personal brand, and from there, people will follow you for those interests.

Isaac Mashman18:46

That's a really great question. I love that question too, because we can look at what I did and I can tell you what not to do. What I mean by that is all of my businesses are named after me for the most part. Mashman Consulting Group, Mashman Ventures, Mashman Investments, Mashman Properties. That is what you should not do unless you are looking to never sell it. I am building my businesses to go back to the old Americana way of passing it on to my son and saying, you're in Daddy's business. That's what I'm building this for, where this is a generational thing. Not everybody wants to do that.

A lot of people want to build a business to exit the business. Now, whether that's good or that's bad, I'm not here to talk about that either. But what I can say is you have to start building a team, building a culture, building it as an extension of you to where if you were to step away, the business can still function. This is something Andy Frisella talks about in depth, and he says that it's [its own microorganism]. That's how you could really tell if a business is good. So with Mashman Consulting Group, I'm building a consultants team to where even if I'm not doing any consultations, I still have a team of people who can go out and land their own clients and are self-sustaining to where they could grow the business.

If they have a question, they could go to Eric or they could go to anybody else that is in that position to say, Hey, what should we be doing? Well, Isaac's not here. That is a business. Versus having a side hustle, or a business that you're only starting, and you're like a one-man shop. It's very difficult to differentiate the two because if you're working solo and there's no other capabilities where [it] can function without you, you're pretty much being a sole proprietor, not a business owner. That's a massive jump, and it's not said in a disrespectful way. Some people want to only be that one-man freelance shop, but that's different than building a business with the culture and having 25 people working for you or having a thousand people work for you.

But you can go and do podcasts and interviews, just like I'm doing, and talk about your business and your expertise on shows. But you should also make sure that you're building your own company's email list, your own company's social media, creating posts and not making yourself necessarily the face of it. Teremana Tequila by Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, I know that Dwayne's behind the company, but it's still functioning with or without Dwayne. Like Aviation Gin. I'm thinking about liquors because all celebrities do is start a liquor company. Aviation Gin was, I believe, sold by Ryan Reynolds, but I'm still going to be buying it because I like the products.

But he was the introductory taste. Right. So you have to make sure that the business is able to withstand itself even if you're out.

Isaac Mashman22:14

Yeah, there shouldn't really be a fear because, I suppose, most of all of this is the same thing as putting yourself out there. A lot of people like their privacy, and a lot of people also don't do it, not because of privacy. They say that privacy is the reason, but the real reason is they just don't feel confident in being able to put themselves out there because they feel like they'd look stupid. I think developing your confidence and your own abilities and going basically baptism by fire is the best way that you can start seeing what works and what doesn't work because, well, what's the worst that's going to happen?

You might look stupid on a show for a couple of minutes, or you might make a simple mistake. It's not like you can't come back from these little mistakes. Your personal brand, the only way that you can ruin yourself forever is if you do something so egregious, I doubt anybody listening to the show would ever do it. Otherwise, you can pivot. Jordan Belfort, the Wolf of Wall Street, scammed so many people, and [they made a] movie about him after he wrote the book. He's now getting paid the same amount of money he was getting paid back then, doing training. So if you say that you're afraid of hurting your personal brand and not being able to come back, look at Jordan Belfort and what he's been able to do over the past decade. It's like, come on now, [quit] making excuses.

Isaac Mashman23:59

I adore that question because some of my best clients are the people who have the authority offline but haven't done it [or been seen] online. Because what you're really asking about is what can I do to build my personal brand online, not build my personal brand offline? That's the real question. So let's take a lawyer, for example, who's been practicing law for 20 years, has a big law practice, is well known in the city, and is the local hero. Let's take, I remember growing up and there was [Farah and Farah], Morgan and Morgan, Harold and Harold, the big lawyers that I saw their commercials after school every day.

Those people could easily go on social media and be like, let's say your name is Todd Smith. Todd Smith, lawyer. So you go on social media, you grab your handle for all of your social media platforms. So it'd be Todd Smith that would be taken. So you would do Todd Smith [Real] or Todd Smith official. You'd grab that handle on every single social media platform, update your profile picture, update your name, update your header image with a photo of you doing something. Then you would put a marketing message together based off of what you're looking to get from your personal brand. So again, do you want to make money?

Are you building your business? Are you driving awareness towards, like, let's say, some of the clients you represent or underrepresented? Okay. Do you want to drive awareness to that? Or do you want to just go and become famous and send out law tips? So you put together a marketing strategy. So I help, let's say, I help people recover damages after automotive accidents. Then in the front of that, you put something personable. So let's say you're a lawyer that is known for going and doing crazy events or crazy stunts in order to get promotion locally. So you would do, your skydiving lawyer. Then, I help people after automotive accidents get the money they deserve.

Then you start creating content that reflects that. You might show a skydiving stunt. You might show yourself bungee jumping or doing an event. Richard Branson is a perfect example of this. Like he did all of these different stunts to build the Virgin brand. He was known for that, but he was also known as the founder and as somebody who was a respectable business magnate. Then you could create content about law and about some of the craziest cases and about some of the things that you've seen over the years. You start doing that and then you naturally get people to follow you. But how do you start from zero with your social media?

Well, you start with the people that you already know. So you reach out to your friends or your colleagues. You'd probably be on LinkedIn. So get your people who you're connected with on LinkedIn to follow you on Facebook, to follow you on Instagram. You start creating the spiderweb, and that's your personal brand online, which you're able to do things with to eventually strengthen and gain more exposure and then get in front of more people, which is ultimately the game. I think eyeballs and attention is like the main reason why you do these things.

Isaac Mashman27:10

Well, I could talk for hours about some of the mistakes I've seen, like I mentioned, using the business page for the personal page, or creating content with another person's quote. That's something I've seen so many people do. It's so dumb. It is the dumbest thing I've ever seen somebody do. It's like, why would you use a photo of yourself with a quote from John D. Rockefeller? That'd be like me going and using Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson's quote next to a photo of me. Yeah. That's not doing anything. As a matter of fact, that's harming your personal brand. Yeah. I've seen people purchasing followers. We could get into the dark side of this.

Purchasing followers, paying for Forbes features, paying for news wires, paying for all these things to get their audience up. All they're doing is they're catering to a bunch of bots and accounts that don't exist. That's not building your personal brand. That is harming your personal brand. Right.

Isaac Mashman29:25

Well, let me answer, or go back to the previous question really quick, and I'll answer that one. One, organic does not necessarily mean it's free. That's something people really need to understand. So there are certain podcasts that charge appearance fees and they're like $3,500 plus. If I see somebody's been on that show, I respect them less because I know that all they did to get on [was pay]. Yeah, they might only have a couple guests per month, but they've bought their way into that. If I see them on certain outlets and I know that they're paid outlets, I don't respect them as much. But Paul, I've been able to land Forbes features and Entrepreneur features and I haven't paid for either of them.

I've done dozens of interviews and 100-plus press interviews and quotes and mentions, and I haven't paid for any of them. Yeah. So it's like if you were to compare the best press ultimately, I'm getting merchandise made about this later this year, actually. I've been thinking about it. I'm going to get a hoodie that says the best press is free press. That's why I have my signature. It's going to be on my front, because this is seriously something that I'm so passionate about. I don't use passion lightly. I've really [never stopped saying] that, because there's just so much slimy crap online. That's part of the reason why I got out of the PR.

I was like, let me launch a consulting firm rather than a public relations firm. So I didn't have so many labels. Now, in terms of somebody who is looking to build their personal brand, what was the second question?

Isaac Mashman30:50

Okay. That's what I was thinking. So let's take politics and religion, for example. This is something that I think a lot of people don't have any direction on what to do. Because we all have political beliefs. We all have really different [views]. Right. When I was younger and when I was early on in this, I used to say you never talk about these subjects at all. Never talk about this. Because it's going to split your audience. But then I realized the converse is true. If somebody has an open enough mind, and we need to get back to the time to where we could have a disagreement on beliefs and still have a conversation.

Isaac Mashman32:47

What you can do is talk about faith and talk about the importance and talk about how faith has helped you with business or how a certain political belief has affected your business or a certain political decision has [caused] your business [costs] to go up. So I think that over the next couple of years, I was asked this question earlier about what are some trends I see. I see, Paul, this necessity and desire for more strategic advice, for more detailed advice, things that like in this podcast, you could reverse engineer or listen to what I'm saying. You have a step by step playbook on what you need to do.

Right. [People] talk about, be authentic, be on social media, do these things. But what value is that? There's a difference between value and strategic value. Right. If you want to grow your personal brand and be the authority, that's what you do. Just like before we started talking, you said, by the way, [I'm] thinking about doing the dollar-a-day strategy for my podcast, like Dennis Yu. Yeah. That is a successful personal brand. Yeah.

Isaac Mashman34:13

There's an author who's writing Christian-related books. There's a little bit of a difference there. So it's like, right, right.

Isaac Mashman35:31

Well, I can think of several brand accounts that I might be subscribed to on YouTube. I don't even know the host's name. That means that as soon as my feed and the algorithm promote another channel that is in the same niche, I'm going to subscribe to them because I have no loyalty to the other. So there's this idea of building a brand account, building your personal brand, and then building a business account. They're all three different things, but I'm thinking of the unboxed review shows or Unbox Therapy or something like that. The guy who reviews all the Apple products. I know the guy's name. I know the channel.

But I know his name. Say tomorrow, if I got recommended another person, [I'd switch]. Like I never go out and look for him by name, but the mentors I follow, the experts I follow, the people, the celebrities I follow, I search for by name, not by brand. So that is a massive thing that people need to think about whenever they're wanting to build like a separate brand. There's a difference between building like some cool products or a podcast name, but having a podcast name, the Headsmack podcast, is not the same as Paul Povolni. Like there's a difference there. Yeah, yeah. So that's one of the biggest mistakes.

Then I would also say limiting themselves to one platform. I think that there are a lot of people who say that, oh, you only need to be on one platform, but there's been so much talk about TikTok being banned. If these people have built 10 million follower pages and audiences on TikTok and it disappears tomorrow, and they haven't diversified, they're out of luck and they have to start over. So I think that the determinant of a strong personal brand is being omnipresent and being everywhere all the time. Having it to where if you were to Google yourself or somebody was to Google you from a different location, no matter where they're at in the world, you're able to pop up. You're able to show up in their feeds.

Isaac Mashman38:31

Yeah. I think being willing to follow the same people on different places and platforms is huge. Like, we're connected on Facebook, and as soon as we're off the show, I'm going to go on to LinkedIn and send you a request. I'll see if you're on Instagram, and I'll see if you're on Twitter and whatever else. That establishes the law of familiarity. I'm talking about this in the second edition of my book. Just like Napoleon Hill did the first practical philosophy of success, I want to do the first practical philosophy of personal branding. That's my ambition, to really define it. I have something called the law of familiarity, because just like you were the new kid in school on day one, by the end of the school year you knew everybody, that anxiety went away showing up.

You didn't have any worries. Your position was secured. You were familiar with your teachers, with your environment, with your students, your classmates. You were familiar. Just like that new kid on the block, building out your personal brand online, you have to get people familiar with you to where their anxieties, their concerns, their questions go away, and to where they automatically think of you in a conversation. Such as the other day, I was sent a referral. She was having a conversation with a prospect, and he's like, I wanted to publish a book. She's like, Isaac Mashman, immediately [sent over a referral], new client. And so it's like, when you're doing these things, you need to be familiar. You need to get people familiar with you.

Isaac Mashman40:19

Well, which is the most impactful: you calling yourself an expert and saying, oh, you can trust me, versus somebody else saying that you can trust this person? Yeah, I vouch for him. Which person are you going to trust the most? The one that has third-party edification. Right, right. Credibility is trust. That is the simplest term. It is trust. It is a sense of faith that whatever this person does is going to meet my expectations. So if you were building yourself up as this expert and as this person who can deliver, a client that works with you, there's a lower action threshold where they're automatically going to pull out their wallets or say, alright, I have one question, but I'm ready to work with you.

You don't have to fight as hard to close them. But you still have to fight to make sure that you're delivering up to their expectations. Right. So when you're building [credibility], or when you're doing things to where other people are able to talk about you, like doing a podcast interview, you invited me on the show, that is a form of edification because you are telling your audience that, hey, you can trust this person. If by the end of the show, you felt like I didn't do what I needed to do, you would delete the episode and act like it never happened. Being on interviews, such as press articles or vlogs or blogs, or collaborating, or just different things where people are able to introduce you.

If you're going to a networking event, get introduced as the number one plumber, the number one graphic designer. There is a degree of trust that is automatically established off of the personal brand of the other person who's edifying you. That is credibility. So every single thing that you could do, whether that's collecting video testimonials or any of the things I just mentioned, to where another person can say, you can trust this person, you can build out your credibility. That is also the biggest step to being a public figure, is now you have people talking about you rather than you talking about yourself.

Isaac Mashman43:08

Well, here's a really good conversation we could go down for a minute that I don't think I've ever had on a show, which is, what can you do to fix that? Yeah. What can you do to fix that? If the expectations that you're talking about for yourself are not necessarily what other people are saying about you. So like, let's say you're getting some negative reviews for your business. Maybe you have a Google My Business listing or [Trustpilot page], and your reviews are like one to three stars. What can you start to do to change that? Well, you have two options. You can address the review, and I would say you need to do both of these steps.

Address the reviews, make up for it, ask what can be done to solve that, and to make that salvageable if possible. The second is to flood it with positive reviews, but this requires you to live up to your word, and to actually deliver so you can collect those positive testimonials. So you fix it, salvage it if possible, and you flood it, and you basically overpower it with more positive feedback and more positive words. Then you could do what a lot of people do in crisis management, which is get ahead of it and say, hey, and be honest, you get [rapport]. Like think about, and this probably wouldn't be the best example to give, but Liver King.

The steroid guy who eats liver. Right. When it came out that he was doing those, he's like, man, I lied. I fucked up. He did that apology. At one point, it almost did more damage than it did help. He got ahead of it by admitting that he's a liar. He could have just kept doing what he was doing and not even addressed the claims. That probably would have been a better way of handling it versus no, I'm a liar. But what you could do is if your work is not performing up to your standards or up to other people's standards, do something, make a post and be like, hey, I've messed up. [Don't] make excuses, be like, I had things [going on].

Isaac Mashman47:40

Well, I think an oak tree can take a hundred years to build and I could cut that thing down in an hour with a chainsaw. Your reputation is effectively that. There are a lot of these things that you don't actively think about when you're building out your personal brand. Unless you're going to a high level, you don't think about what is my reputation? That's not a question that you're asking in the front of your mind. You're thinking, how can I get more followers? That's the God honest truth, that's okay. But as you scale and as you get more exposure and more people talking about you, to where the biggest indicator (I've said the biggest indicator, but there are several indicators) that you have entered into that public figure status is, you have more people who know you that you do not know yourself.

Yeah. So I've had several people recently that have reached out to me and be like, hey, I've been following you for five years and I'm like, I feel bad because I don't know you. Yeah, yeah. It's the same reason why you could go and approach a celebrity that you've been following for 10 years and be like, oh my God, I know everything about you. I know your daughter's name. I know where you went to school. I know where you were born. I know your birthday. They don't know who you are. Right? So I think understanding that this takes time and all of those contributing factors do add up over time.

Once you get to the point where more people know about you and who you are than you know them, that's a good indicator. That's like a moment where you [need to realize] this. I had one of those earlier this year. It was one of the biggest aha moments, I think, of my entire career, of my entire life, frankly, that I haven't spoken about too much in depth.

Isaac Mashman50:20

I've officially done what I wanted to do five years ago, to where I get pitched every day to invest in companies. I got pitched to invest in a script. I've gotten hundreds, probably thousands, of emails at this point. Not every day, but over the span of the past year, with all these people reaching out to me because they found my profile, because they found me somewhere. Yeah. That was an aha, head-smack moment where I'm like, damn, I have the knowledge panel. I show up on Google. I've done these things. I've traveled. I know what I'm talking about and people know that I know what I'm talking about.

That I think is a big moment that people need to make too, especially business owners or anybody trying to do something. It's like taking a step back and thinking, holy crap, I've done it. I might not feel like I'm where I want to be 100%, but it's like, no, like it's there. Yeah. That's a crazy, crazy thing to experience.

Isaac Mashman51:27

It is a really great question. These questions always stump me. I never get stumped by [other] questions, but these questions always throw me off. I would have to go along the lines of faking it till you make it. Okay. This is something that a lot of people do online. They get in front of the Lamborghini. They get in front of the Rolls Royce. Get in front of whatever, the mansion, the Airbnb. They're trying to be Tai Lopez rip-offs. That's unethical. It's unethical, it's immoral. But is there a degree of acceptability for faking it so you make it? When I was a young entrepreneur, I didn't make it seem like I was rich or some ultra-successful person.

But I still exuded confidence and made sure that I was building my ability in whatever business I was doing to where I knew that I wasn't deceiving the person on the other end of the phone. Then eventually I became that person to where no, like he legitimately knows what he's doing. There's no question about it. I think that business owners are afraid of being fraudulent. I think that's a good fear. I think that's a really healthy fear. I think when you're building your personal brand, don't feel like you're a fraud for putting yourself out there. That's probably the best thing I could say right now.

Don't feel like a fraud for putting yourself out there, maybe even early, because all these great people had to put themselves [out there] early and had to shoot their shot in order to make their first couple of baskets.

Isaac Mashman55:16

Well, I think one, if you're thinking about authenticity, you're being inauthentic because you're trying to manipulate what you are or aren't putting out. So don't focus on authenticity. That's bullshit. Everybody says be authentic and nobody explains what that means. That means you're being inauthentic. That's just the God honest truth, there's no way, no ifs, ands, or buts, that you can get around that. Yeah.

Isaac Mashman57:44

Sometimes that's what you have to do. I've had cases with that where clients have gone berserk. It's like, that's a part of building a business. That's part of scaling up, and starting to do things that make your process better, more efficient, safer, more secure, higher quality. All these things are ultimately, I think, the pursuit of clarity. Like I mentioned earlier today, why I went into different businesses and why I went through these changes is the pursuit of clarity. If I'm clear that I'm making money or doing this because I'm looking to provide for my family or build the vehicle that will build the skyscraper I want to build, well, I don't necessarily care if you don't like how I talk or you don't like a certain thing that I said, or you disagree with me.

But there's a difference between, I think, understanding if somebody's giving you genuine advice versus somebody who is genuinely hating. At the same point, I think asking for advice or asking for opinions is important and underrated. If we think about one of the most criticized works, which is Niccolo Machiavelli's The Prince, he talks about how the king, the prince that is going to remain in power, always actively seeks out the advice of the people he trusts. Yeah. But he disregards any advice that [is] given without being asked. Yeah. I think that's a good philosophy to live by. You don't want to listen to somebody who's just saying, hey, you need to do this. But if you ask somebody, a mentor, a coach, a brotherly figure, what do you think about this?

Isaac Mashman1:00:24

Well, I have a feeling that a lot of the people who listen to your show probably have lead magnets. They probably have books that are lead magnet PDFs or whatever that are 30, 40, 50, 60 pages long. Have you ever considered publishing that as a physical copy of an actual book, getting an ISBN, investing in it, and having an actual paperback that you can give out to people? You mentioned briefly the Amazon author thing of, are you an Amazon best-selling author in some niche category? I think that there is no less pride that you can take in being the best-selling author in a certain category.

So for example, my manifesto wasn't the best seller on Amazon, but my manifesto was the number one new release in public relations on Amazon. It was a top 10 bestseller in public relations on Amazon. I provide that clarification and people respect me more for it. So I think the details matter, it's very important, when building out your personal brand, the whole "as seen in CBS, Fox News" kind of thing. No, you sent out a press release that was picked up by CBS 42 out of Nebraska or the Fox News, Wilmington, Washington, whatever. Be honest, be truthful, have integrity, have a moral compass, a moral code, and your personal brand will thank you for it, the people in your network will thank you for it, and trust your own ability and start building that confidence. Paul, it's been a phenomenal conversation, man. Very tactical, things that I haven't talked about before. I really enjoyed it. Thanks, man.

Isaac Mashman1:02:00

You can find me literally everywhere at Isaac Mashman on every social media platform. You could go to isaacmashman.com or Mashman.org. Pretty cool domain I picked up. You can find all my information there and you can grab a physical copy of my manifesto, Personal Branding: A Manifesto on Fame and Influence. I'm currently in the process of writing the second edition, coming out later this year.