Marketing Your Business in 2026

Isaac Mashman1:35

[Naylor], man, pleasure to be here. I need you to pronounce your last name slowly for me. How do you say your last name?

Isaac Mashman2:57

Yeah. How about you? If you [could] completely take the pressure off of, like, the timestamp of "I have to be back," what I would do is I'd go to Europe, fly into Paris, and take a train all through Europe. That's what I would do personally. I was in France about six years [ago], but I was there for an entire month and it was one of the best experiences in my entire life. So 100% recommend. That's coming from somebody who doesn't have any roots based in Europe for the most part. Probably six generations back. Nonetheless, really excited, [Naylor], man, for a conversation and to be able to talk with you.

Obviously a friend of Eric's is a friend of mine. He's one of the best professionals I've had the pleasure of meeting in my entire business career. So yeah, just really, really grateful, and let's dive in.

Isaac Mashman3:44

Yeah, Mashman. Mashman. Yep. All right. I don't have any cool story behind this.

Isaac Mashman4:17

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 I'll start from a good place: originally from Jacksonville, Florida. I was born into a single-parent household and never met my biological father, and then had a relationship with him later in life. That's an important part of my story, though, because ironically that's part of the reason why I got into personal branding.

Isaac Mashman5:01

When I got into high school, I started getting involved with the idea of social media and following Gary Vaynerchuk, as everybody knows. I realized my last name was a huge opportunity, because there isn't any other Mashman named Isaac that I'm competing with, let alone many, many Mashmans at all. So it was a golden opportunity, and something that a lot of people who don't have a unique last name don't have: the blessing of not having to fight with anybody else for visibility, for SEO, and for what shows up. But nonetheless, I was raised in that single-parent household and I had a blue-collar [grandfather who worked in] cabinetry, and I used to get up and go early with my grandmother to take him [to work].

Isaac Mashman5:50

I graduated top 10 in my class. I was set to go to UCF or FSU. I was one SAT test away from the Bright Futures scholarship. My senior year, I got introduced to network marketing. That industry, I'll give a lot of credit to it in terms of learning sales and understanding that there was more to life than the thrift store shoes or the Great Value-branded products. I was in that industry for a couple of years. I was in three different companies, four different times, and I realized that industry had a lot of labels. 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. So I got out of that industry, tried my hand a little bit at drop shipping, and I was in the music management industry for a little bit. I was in California sleeping on the floor and doing that whole spiel. 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 I would write on Medium or my website, and by building my social media presence. Every time I pivoted businesses, something interesting happened, Naylor. 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. That kind of set the tone for 2020, [when] the pandemic happened. I was starting to build a record label and I was managing a musician named Diggy. We were going to do a concert. I was going to fly out to Fort Wayne, [Indiana]. Then COVID popped up. We were like, okay, is this the zombie apocalypse? Or is this the common cold? We didn't know at the time.

So he canceled the concert. The artist lost his passion. I realized the music industry might not have been for me, because the only way to make money in the music industry was to scale to a very high level or to screw over the artists that you're working with. I don't want to do either of those. It's not that I'm some musical talent. I'm not going to be behind the microphone. It's funny because I do public speaking, but I'm not the artist here. I'm not going to be recording vocals and popping on a soundtrack. I started my public relations firm, built that for a few years, and then decided that at the core of my public relations firm was a consultancy.

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, oh, he's a coach. 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. So in 2024, I made the public commitment, dissolved my public relations firm, and launched Mashman Consulting Group, which is my current focus and what I plan on taking to a $100 million company over the next decade.

The center of that is personal branding, and I'm really grateful for all the opportunities that I've been able to be involved with just within the past year of launching that business.

Isaac Mashman11:03

Well, it was a lot of reverse engineering, and that goes back to my early days when I was sitting in school. I had a bunch of free periods my senior year because I did all my prerequisites. Once I realized that I wasn't going to college, I wasn't so focused on getting all the AP classes and filling up my calendar, my schedule, with extracurriculars. I was sitting during my lunch period and the latter half of the day prior to weightlifting. 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.

That's what I did. I reverse engineered. I was like, okay, well, what did Gary V do? He started with a podcast. So he had the GaryVee Audio Experience and I did The Isaac Mashman Show. 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 I launched another podcast. And I would reverse engineer what they did on Google. How did they start to claim their search page? Their search engine result page. 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.

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 line's Instagram page? This is very superficial. There's tactical advice, okay, here's the handle, here's what you could put in the bio, and all this other stuff. So I usually say that I stumbled into personal branding. Then, through the public relations research, 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, if you're launching a new business, whether that's a landscaping business or 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. It is something that every person [has]. This later evolved into the second edition of my book, "Personal Branding: A Manifesto on Fame and 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. This is a really cool history lesson in terms of the term, because the average person isn't aware of what personal branding is. 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. So that's part of my mission and part of MCG, Mashman 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. That was done by a business management consultant who did consulting work for Hewlett-Packard, McKinsey, and a few other major, major firms. He's a legend in the space, Tom Peters. He wrote an article in 1997 titled "The Brand Called You." It's about an eight-page article. It's definitely worth reading. That was the first time the term personal branding was ever coined. He had early adopters like William Arruda and Gary Vaynerchuk, who started talking about personal branding.

But again, it's an entirely new field. It's an entirely new space. To me, and the way that my brain operates, I think of that as a beautiful challenge, because now I'm able to really develop the philosophy behind it. I'm able to develop the academia behind it and, again, spread the awareness.

Isaac Mashman16:54

Let me take a step back here and define what personal branding really is, and I'll define it by asking you a question. What is the first story in the [Bible]?

Isaac Mashman17:10

Of who? Of Adam and Eve and the garden. Right. Okay. So whether you're a believer in Christianity or any other major religion or a believer in evolution, even people who believe in evolution accept that it started with two people. 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 centered around great people and their actions. So personal branding at its core is you. And this is something I'm working on that I haven't publicized at all, but [it's] 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, how you speak, it is all of your life experiences. Then on a broader spectrum of what it can do for you, it's your career, it's your brand. So I wrote a paper called Identity Positioning™ and this is a proprietary strategy where it splits personal branding in two. So if you 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.

What most people are focusing on now is what they could do to make more money. The career aspects. 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. [Think of] Liam Neeson in 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 a massive opportunity, [because even when] you're not [around], the people who know you for something are having conversations with other people.

You could be the first person that comes up 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. That's done through networking, the same way that Eric made the introduction here. You think about how that introduction worked. Eric gave words of edification to me, edification meaning that this is somebody you need to have a conversation with. Then from there we had a conversation and now I'm on the podcast. 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?

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 become 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 talk specifically to the people who are listening to the show and to the podcast and who are within your own field.

[Naylor], you 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, the biggest qualm 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 a 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, there are so many avenues and aspects, but I would say social media is the easiest way to get started with it. It can be as simple as starting an Instagram page, getting on Facebook, getting on LinkedIn, and 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 [branding].

That seamlessness across all of these different platforms and verticals is, again, a big aspect of positioning. You think about the mentors that you're following, these A-list celebrities. Every profile, every website, every collaboration, every sponsorship, it communicates a similar [message].

Isaac Mashman22:18

Well, I think complicating it is a massive mistake. [People] think that it has to look perfect. People think that it has to have the best video equipment. It's like, if you have an iPhone, if you have a modern phone, 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. As your personal brand grows, then you could reinvest into better equipment, better technologies. Or like we were saying before we even hit record, with the introduction of AI, it can edit videos now within 30 seconds.

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, [versus doing] 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 small business, especially. They'll use their landscaping page or their small startup page, 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. 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, if you're getting on social media and you're trying to build your personal brand while also building 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. 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, making sure that people are aware that you even own a business. 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

Yeah. Every year I like attaching a word to the year. 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. 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 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 in 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 be here 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 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 reverse engineering again, [not] just from accumulating knowledge, but reverse engineering the steps that I need to take in order to actually achieve these goals.

Isaac Mashman26:25

I'm really easy to be found. I would hope so. Being in the business of personal branding, it's like, if you can't find me, there's something wrong. Don't trust me whatsoever. But you can find me across social media at @isaacmashman, my website at isaacmashman.com, or my book, "Personal Branding: A Manifesto on Fame and Influence," which is available on Amazon and has distribution to 40,000 different retailers, universities, and libraries, which is really cool. From the first edition of my book that I published in 2021 to the second edition in 2025, I learned so much, man. So yeah, I'm really easy to be found.

Isaac Mashman27:22

This kind of question always hits me because I want to provide information that's most tactical to the listener. 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 [IONOS] or whatnot, and purchase your first and last name. Now again, if your name [is] holistically unique, like ours, I don't think you're fighting with any other [Naylor Taliaferro] for your visibility. The same way that I'm not fighting with any other Isaac Mashman. 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 Taliaferro] Official. Right. Got the name right. I saw that. You could end up with a good marketing message. This is where Identity Positioning™ comes into play. I always advocate that you need to have a personal hook 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? This is massive for public speakers. If you go on stage and you immediately start hitting people with strategies, and 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 optimize, scale, and position their personal brands. So that "addicted to coffee" piece, 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? [Why] would somebody want to support you? Because you're fighting with billions of people for visibility. Even in your industry, you're fighting potentially hundreds of thousands of other landscapers or hundreds of thousands of other water feature guys, [all] to ultimately get business and stand out as that expert.

Isaac Mashman30:49

Absolutely, Naylor, and thank you again for the opportunity. It's been cool, as the episode's gone on, to see the Christmas lights in the background getting [brighter].