Marketing Your Business in 2026

Isaac Mashman4:40

Yeah. Mashman. Mashman. Yep. All right. And I don't have any cool story behind this. Oh, good. I just fall obligated to, you know, you asked me about my last day. So like, well, let me make sure, you know, so, well, that's good. Well, why don't you start off with, you know, before we get into branding and, and, you know, you're kind what you've really been focusing on. You've got books, you speak on it. Let's just kind of get everyone caught up to speed like who you are, you know, how you got into your entrepreneurial journey and how you got to where you're at now. Absolutely, man.

And the longer I've been in business and the longer I've been in this game, the shorter my synopsis of my life usually becomes, because I realize, man, I don't need to go back to the very, very beginning. But, you know, I'll I'll start from a good place, originally from Jacksonville, Florida. I was born into a single parent household, never met my biological father, then have a relationship with him later in life. And that's really an important part of my story though, because that's ironically, part of the reason why I got into personal branding, because it's interesting,

Isaac Mashman5:35

file using, you know, cabinetry and used to get up and go early with my grandmother to take him. And one of the things that was instilled in my brain was, hey, go to school, get good grades, go to college because we're not going to be able to pay for a degree. So I graduated top 10 in my class. I was set to go to UCF or FSU. I was one S.A.T. test away from the bright future scholarship. And my senior year, I got introduced to network marketing. And that industry, I'll give a lot of credit to you in terms of learning sales and understanding that there was more to life than the thrift store shoes or the great value-branded products.

And I was in that industry for a couple of years. I was in three different companies, four different times, and realizing that industry had a lot of labels. And not only did it have a lot of labels, it had a lack of control. I wasn't ever going to be at the top making executive decisions. And so I got out of that industry, tried my hand a little bit at drop shipping, and I

Isaac Mashman6:37

I was in California sleeping on the floor and doing that whole spiel. And what I was doing while I was going throughout all these different businesses was starting to build my personal brand unbeknownst to me through an early podcast, through articles that would write on Medium or my website, and building my social media presence. And every time I pivoted businesses, something interesting happened, Naylor. And that was people continued to support me. It wasn't necessarily they were following me for what I could do for them. They were following me because of who I was, because I was this young entrepreneurial spirit, this young businessman who was trying to figure it all out. And that kind of set the tone for 2020, the pandemic happened.

Isaac Mashman8:09

was a consultancy. And I ran away from the title of a consultant because I felt like I didn't earn it. I felt like it was, again, one of those preemptive guru kind of statements, you know, oh, he's a coach. You know, and I never was involved with coaching, but it felt similar. It felt like it was cut from the same cloth, although coaching is a lot more sentimental, it's a lot more emotion-based, and consulting is more tactical and strategy involved. And so in 2024, I made the public commitment

Isaac Mashman11:30

And I'd be in the library editing my podcast. I'd be watching Gary Vaynerchuk's videos. I'd be just trying to figure all this out and I would start reverse engineering my mentors. And that's what I did. I reverse engineering. I was like, okay, well, what did Gary V do? He started with a podcast. And so he had the Gary V audio experience and I did the Isaac Mashman show. And it's goofy. I listened to those earlier episodes and I'm like, man, those were awful. I'm surprised anybody listens to them. But it was the small little amateur swings that started to kind of set the framework that I eventually improved upon and launched another podcast and that I would reverse engineer what they did on Google.

How did they start to claim their search page? Their search engine result page. And then when I was in California and I realized that I wasn't doing the music industry, I started to look at, okay, everybody focuses on the business, right? Everybody was coming to me in my friend group at the time. They were like, how do I improve my entrepreneurial hustle? How do I improve my clothing lines, Instagram page? And this is very superficial. You know, there's tactical advice, you know, okay, here's the handle, here's what you could put in the bio and all this other stuff. And so I usually say that I stumbled into personal branding.

And then I, through the public relations research, and I was researching again all these public figures and kind of the history of public relations. And I realized that there was this blue ocean opportunity in the personal branding space specifically because talking about personal branding and company branding are two entirely separate subjects. Because when you think about it, you're launching a new business, whether that's a landscaping business or whether that's a consultancy or a drop shipping brand or whatever, you have to give that business characteristics. You have to give it a color scheme. You have to give it a name. You have to file the paperwork.

You have to determine the website and what fonts you're using and what emotions you want the consumer to feel whenever they're coming across your product or your business, your service. But personal branding is innate. And it is something that every person, this later evolved into the second edition of my book, Personal Braining of Manifesto and Famine Influence, where I talk about the philosophy of personal branding in a much more holistic depth. Because whenever you hear the term personal branding, a lot of times people focus on that tactical surface level advice. They talk about how you can improve how you show up on Google, how you can get more attention and more visibility.

But very rarely do people talk about it as an innate aspect of human existence. And this is a really cool history lesson in terms of the term because the average person isn't aware of what personal branding is. You know, it's not common. Within the business space, within the online entrepreneur space, within the influencer space, everybody knows what personal branding is to a degree, but it's not like common knowledge to where you could walk down the street and be like, what is personal branding? It's not there yet. And so that's part of my mission and part of MCG, Master in Consulting Group's mission statement to kind of bring this broader awareness and really give it meaning.

But in 1997, the actual term personal branding was used for the very first time. And that was done by a business management consultant who did consulting work for Hewlett Packard, McKinsey, a few other major, major firms. He's a legend in the space, Tom Peters. And he wrote an article in 1997 titled The Brand Called You. And it's about an eight page article. It's definitely worth reading. And that was the first time the term personal branding was ever coined. And he had early adopters like William Arruda or Gary Vaynerchuk who started talking about personal branding. But again, it's an entirely new field. It's an entirely new space.

And to me, and the way that my brain operates and the way that I think, I think of that as a beautiful challenge. Because now I'm able to really develop the philosophy behind it. able to develop the academia behind it and again spread the awareness.

Isaac Mashman16:54

every season. Let me take a step back here and define what personal braining really is and I'll define it by asking you a question. What is the first story in the

Isaac Mashman17:16

or any other major religion or believer in evolution, you know, even people who believe in evolution except that it started with two people, right? Adam and Eve. So we've been studying personal brands this entire time. Jesus Christ, Martin Luther King, Muhammad Gandhi, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, everybody, every person, all of our history books, it is all catered around great people and their actions. And so personal branding at its core is you. It is your, and this is something I'm working on that I haven't publicized at all, but really understanding the elements of personal branding. So if I don't have the elevator pitch down to an exact science just yet I have to apologize.

But if you think about it, it is the outward expression of your identity. So it is your personal traits, it's your physical characteristics, how you look, how you sound, you speak, it is all of your life experiences and then on a broader spectrum of what it can do for you, it's your career, it's your brand, right? And so I wrote a paper called Identity Positioning and this is a proprietary strategy where it splits your, it splits personal branding in two. So if you, you know, take the phrase and you draw a line down the middle, you have the person on the left and you have the brand on the right.

And what most people are focusing now is focusing on what they could do to make more money, right? The career aspects, you know? So positioning yourself as a public figure. Now, what goes into positioning yourself as a public figure? It's showing that you are an expert who knows a specific set of knowledge. You have a specific set of skills. Anything about Liam Neeson and Taken. It's like, I have a set of skills. It's the same thing with your personal brand. So whether you're a landscaper, whether you're a water feature guy, whether you're a business owner who's in the service-based business of even therapy, Talking about what you're doing and increasing the broader awareness around your expertise and around what you're doing Man, it's it's a massive opportunities where when you're having conversations with people That you're not even or were the people who know you for something they're having conversations with other people and you could be the first person that Comes up, you know when a specific problem is introduced That is how you generate more business because you are the number one expert in that person's mind And that's done through networking the same way that Eric made the introduction here.

You know, you think about how that introduction worked. Eric gave words of edification to mean, edification meaning that this is somebody you need to have a conversation with. And then from there we had a conversation and now I'm on the podcast. And so it's the same thing for every professional or business owner who's listening to this. What can you do to position yourself as that authority within your business? And that can be done through a variety of different ways using social media. That is the lowest barrier of entry in terms of marketing yourself and marketing your skills, marketing your business. A hundred years ago, if you were a business owner, you had to go out and shake hands.

You had to go to these events. You had to take all of this time to come well known in your local community and your local city. You were, for the most part, limited based off of geography and based off of your location. But now you can create a video and talk about, hey, these are some mistakes that first-time landscapers make, and talking specifically to the people who are listening to the show and to the podcast and who are within your own field, Naylor would be talking about some of the best types of grass. If you're thinking about it, or the best kinds of tools doing tutorials, doing walkthroughs, you could even talk from a consumer standpoint of, hey, how do you hire a good landscaper?

What do you look for? What are the questions? If you think about it, what are the biggest qualms that people have when they're hiring somebody to cut their grass or do landscaping is reliability. So you could talk about how you can become more reliable landscaper and how that would help you generate more business and more trust within your own community so you can scale that business. So again, like there's so many avenues and aspects, but I would say social media is the easiest way to get started with it. And if it can be as simple as starting an Instagram page, getting on Facebook, getting on LinkedIn and, you know, securing your handle.

So I'm a big advocate for seamless branding, making sure that you're showing up the same exact way across every medium that you're on. So if you were to go to Google and type in Isaac Mashman, you're going to see that it's at Isaac Mashman on every social media page. I have the same marketing message within my bio. I have the same website, URL links, and trading that that's seenlessness across all of these different platforms and verticals is again a big aspect of positioning. You think about the mentors that you're following, you know, these A-list celebrities. Every profile, every website, every collaboration, every sponsorship, it communicates a similar

Isaac Mashman22:18

Well, I think complicating it is a massive mistake. think that it has to look perfect. People think that it has to have the best video equipment. And it's like, if you have an iPhone, if you have a modern phone, it's like you have thousands of dollars worth of video equipment right there in your hands. So again, you don't have to have the best microphone to start your podcast. My first podcast man was recorded on an outdated iPhone 6 that a friend gave me in high school. It doesn't need to be anything spectacular. And as your personal brand grows, then you could reinvest into better equipment, better technologies.

Or like we were saying before we even hit record, you know, with the introduction of AI, you know, it can edit videos now within 30 seconds and it can be as good, if not better, than paying somebody and relying on another third party to edit that content or whatever you're producing, you know, it yourself. So that would be one of the initial mistakes that I would say people focus on in terms of technology and equipment, they think that they have to have something great. The second thing would be using their company page as their personal page. This is something I see a lot of in terms of small business, especially they'll use their landscaping page or their small startup page and they'll use first person pronouns and they'll be like, I, and it's like, no, this is a company that you're building.

So creating a split between, hey, this is myself, this is my personal page and this is my company page. And that actually creates a great symbiotic relationship because you as the founder are able to talk about your business, but you're not limited to your business. So I would say, you know, if you're getting on social media and you're trying to build your personal brand, while also build your company brand, a great ratio here would be for every two business posts that you make on your personal page, do one post that is personal related. You know, it could be a day out with your family. It could be at a business event.

It could be a hobby that you're engaged with. and making sure that people are aware that you even own a business. And then on your business page, that's when you focus specifically on what you're doing for people, but understanding that there is a big difference between the two.

Isaac Mashman24:38

What's on the horizon for you? Yeah, in 2026 is, you know, every year I like attaching a word to the year, right? I think that that's a good way to kind of help frame your actions and set the tone, set the intention for the upcoming year. Next year is all about becoming inevitable, right? And taking all of this intellectual property that I've developed, taking all of this knowledge that I've accrued and actually making sure that the broader consumer, right? knows who I am in terms of personal branding. So I am launching the inevitable tour 365, which is essentially why we first got introduced and that is where I'm doing 365 interviews and 365 days.

So it is a massive undertaking. You're one of the first 10 shows that'll be on for 2026, man. So thank you for the opportunity to hear and talk about what I'm doing and talk about this mission. So next year I'm doing my tour, I'm working on another book, I'm working on creating the broader field for personal branding. So I'm in this very creative space right now, obviously doing more public speaking and scaling MCG man. I have a few people I want to bring on next year is also the year that I want to retire my mom and have her start working for me. So yeah, it's it's exciting.

It's exciting. I don't know exactly how I'm going to make it all happen. But I think setting the intention of working in reverse engineering again, just from accumulating knowledge, but reverse engineering the steps that I need to take in order to actually achieve these goals.

Isaac Mashman26:27

I would hope so, right? Being in the business of personal branding, it's like, if you can't find me, there's something wrong. You know, don't trust me whatsoever. But you can find me across social media at @isaacmashman, my website, @isaacmashman.com, or my book, Personal Branding and Manifesto

Isaac Mashman27:22

before we wrap up here? Mm. This kind of question always hits me because I want to provide information that's most tactical to the listener, right? And so a couple takeaways that I would give anybody who's listening to this would be to purchase their own personal domain. So go to GoDaddy, go to IONUS or whatnot and purchase, you know, first and last name. Now again, if your name isn't holistically unique, like, you know, ours, I don't think you're fighting with any other nailer for your visibility. The same way that I'm not fighting with any other Isaac Mashman, but But you could go to GoDaddy, purchase your domain, and if it's unavailable, you could put official at the very end.

So imagine if my name wasn't unique, it would be Isaac Mashman Official, and this would also be the strategy that I employ for securing your username across all of these platforms as well. So it would be at Isaac Mashman Official, or at Naylor Talio Farrow Official, right?

Isaac Mashman28:20

And this is where Identity Positioning comes into play. I always advocate that you need to have a personal book and a professional punchline. Because if you think about it, a lot of people use social media just for business and they only talk about what I can do for you. But what about who you are as a person and creating that emotional connection between you and the audience? And this is massive for public speakers. If you go on stage and you immediately start hitting people with strategies, but I don't know the first thing about you, why am I supposed to trust you? How am I supposed to connect with you as a person?

So all marketing messages should have a personal hook and a professional punchline. So mine, for example, is addicted to coffee and I help emerging and established public figures, optimized, scale and position their personal brands. So that addicted to coffee piece, you know, it's just a really quirky, easy way to build rapport and I would challenge anybody who's listening here to talk about not only who you are, but also what you can do. Like what is the takeaway? I would somebody want to support you because you're fighting with billions of people for visibility. And even in your industry, you're fighting, you know, potentially hundreds of thousands of other landscapers or hundreds of thousands of other water feature guys, you know, it's to ultimately get business and stand out as that expert.