Developing and Sustaining Unrivaled Personal Brands

Isaac Mashman4:51

Yes, well, I'm born and raised in Jacksonville, Florida. I never met my biological father. I didn't connect with him until much later in life. So I kind of had the stereotypical entrepreneur, some kind of hardship story. The more I share that story, the less power I think it has because I realize that pretty much everybody can make a negative story and take it and turn it into a positive. But growing up, I saw my mom working a lot of lower wage jobs as a brilliant woman. She had her own degrees. In large part, I was raised by my grandparents. I used to get up early in the morning, five o'clock with my grandmother, my grandfather drive across town, dropped my father or my grandfather off at the carpentry shop where he was a woodworker.

He used to build cabinets. Thinking through, at a young age, my grandmother instilled in me. She said, Hey, you need to use your brains. You don't have to use your back. Looking around me, I saw a lot of people that were doing the opposite. They were using their back but not using their brain. So what I decided to do is go throughout school and I was an excellent student, but my senior year of high school, I'm thinking to myself, okay, I see my mom with a master's degree not using it. I say this out of respect. It's college really the route that I want to go.

I was introduced to network marketing at the time and had some really ambitious kids that were only a couple years older than me. But I saw that and I saw the idea of a mentor. I saw the idea of somebody living an alternative life and so rather than going to college and taking the SAT test one more time and getting a full ride. I decided to go first into business and over the past six years I've had plenty of trials and tribulations and plenty of different endeavors and pivots. But now I finally found the one business that is my vehicle for future investments and such and that's my consulting group.

Isaac Mashman7:10

Yes, well, I think that we need to make a big distinguished raw line in the sand, so to speak. There's a massive difference between talking about a business brand and talking about a personal brand. So what I do is I work with people to build out their personal brand. Now, what is a personal brand? Well, Kevin McShan, that is your personal brand. You are you. You are the one who's lived your entire life. You're the one who has your connections, your relationships, your story, your pain points. A lot of these facts that you don't let hold you back, which I was delving a little bit into you, and I think it's amazing what you're doing today.

Setting a tone, you took something that was such a disadvantage that other people would think of and turned it into a strategic advantage to propel you forward. I'm Isaac Mashman. I'm the only Isaac Mashman who's ever walked there. So living my experience and living my story, I developed these unique attributes, these unique connections, these unique advantages, and that all comes together to make up my personal brand, who I am. Now, if we're talking about a business, yeah, you give that business an identity. You are going to define it, you're going to come up with the logo and the marketing colors and all of that good stuff in the description and the name and the socials.

But you as an owner, you as an entrepreneur can leverage your personal brand, those unique connections that you have to you and those unique characteristics to grow your business. You can leverage your business brands, the business that you're running, to give you credibility and get you into more doors and more room.

Isaac Mashman8:53

Personal brand, I would like to speak to personal branding specifically here. I think part of that is not obsessing. I say that because when I first launched my first podcast way back in 2017-18, I would obsess over every hum, every breath, every small little detail I thought. I would try to edit those out while I was sitting behind my desk in high school. So as I've gotten older, I realize that the only person that's really obsessing over those small details and those small aspects are myself. People who are looking in and listening and watching, those people are here for you and here for the value that you can bring to them.

So I think that developing confidence is also developing your own abilities because where I am today compared to where I was back then, there was coming from a place of arrogant confidence versus actual confidence, which is I know what I know. So I think, again, we could even call that arrogant confidence, cockiness. But you have to start somewhere, and eventually you develop those skills to where you know what you need to do spend less time on the tasks that used to take you a ton of time before. So the other thing that I'll mention really quick is building confidence in your brand is talking about establishing credibility.

So this is external. I just talked about internal, let's talk about external. So external confidence would be having credibility and having results that you can show other people. So if you were to get approached by somebody and they would say, hey, why would I work with you? Pull up a business listing and say, oh, I have 55-star reviews, or you pull up a playlist on YouTube with all of your video testimonials and you say, hey, I've worked with all these people. These are people who took time out of their day to record a conversation, or speaking on stages, having people who have booked you in the event in the past or having video content of it, that is able to verify that you are who you say you are.

Isaac Mashman11:20

Well, people get too big to do the little things and they wonder why they don't have the big results. So even though, let's say creating content on social media, right, if you create content on social media, you reach 100 people. Then eventually a thousand and then 10,000 and you just stop creating content, that momentum is going to die out. So there are moments when you just have to be extremely consistent. I don't like saying consistent usually because I feel like it just gets talked about. But it truly boils down to if you have momentum, you need to keep that momentum because it's much easier to keep than it is to restart it and reestablish it.

So scaling a brand that can be through interactions such as this, once you have a social media presence for yourself, then you can start going externally and finding people that have audiences, that have their own connections, that have their own abilities, that have their own networks that you can build up off of. So you don't have to do the same thing over and over again for yourself. You're using other people to help you achieve your aim and you're providing value to their audience because if you're not providing value, I mean think about it. If I didn't have anything to talk about, you wouldn't have invited me, right, Kevin? So there's strategic value that can be exchanged.

Isaac Mashman12:53

What are your thoughts then? Value in of itself can be as simple as motivating somebody. There's a difference between motivating somebody actually providing strategic steps on how to get motivated or how to keep it or what they need to do to continue that pathway. So get up off the bed. Go out. Listening to some audio versus, hey, if you want to improve your likelihood of getting up or going out and doing these things, you need to, what about earlier, do X, Y, and Z. So one is strategic and one is just blanketed statement, blanketed advice. So talking about personal success, not just professional, what I always like to do is I reverse engineer the people who have the results that I want.

So when I was writing my book, I looked at other authors and I said, okay, what do I need to do to go through this distribution process and this publishing process, et cetera. So if you're looking to lose weight or myself, it's like reverse engineer those people who are fit. If you want to make more money, reverse engineer the people who have the money and see what they did in order to improve their own life. So when you're listening to somebody or you're fighting somebody to follow online, just follow the person who makes you feel good or might get you motivated. Follow the person who gives the pieces and the tactics that you can actually use that are tangible. We don't need more cliches. We need more strategy. Yeah, absolutely, my friend. One of the strategies.

Isaac Mashman14:31

Well, I think that coffee has an emotional connection to me. It was a rite of passage years ago when I was in Boy Scouts I remember going and the only way that you could get coffee was you would have to be a senior patrol leader or you'd have to be a little bit older and the Scout Masters would brew coffee on camping trips and it would be the strongest coffee. I mean a lot of the scout leaders were all ex-military, so they had this rough around the edges approach. I remember the moment that I was able to get coffee from the scout leaders was like, man, like, well, this is like a rite of passage.

My grandmother used to always brew coffee. When I would get back from school, I'd have a cup. Or when I'd go visit her because there would be moments where I would be across town, go to school, and then go to my grandparents the day after. It has that emotional security. Now for me personally, I drink my coffee black. Some days I'll add creamer if I really want to, it's some sugar high or sugar fix, but nine times out of 10, I would dare say 99% of the times I drink it straight black, maybe add a couple of ice cubes. I'm a simple man, I like the breakfast blend, and I'm good to go.

Isaac Mashman15:59

Interesting. I think this is timely to ask because this is something I've been thinking about. Every time that I'm recently launching a new business, so I had a public relations for Mashman Ventures, which I decided to dissolve to launch my consulting firm out of little Rock. When I made the decision to dissolve Mashman Ventures and launch Mashman Consulting Group, I had to go through the entire process of reestablishing the brand, building it. I didn't have to go through so many pangs of establishing credibility because I've already done that. Once you keep credibility, you just have to nurture it and make sure you continue keeping it.

I had to go out and send a lot of messages and what happens in sales a lot of times you get told no and so into the end those times of getting told no or getting objections would you let that affect your energy and get you discouraged or you going to keep powering through and. So I think that talking about being energetically resilient it's not letting those things continue keeping you down for an extended amount of time and being able to bounce back just like if you were to fling a rubber band, you fling it, you're pulling it back. Then it launches forward or shooting a bow, you pull the arrow back and then it launches forward.

I think that's the same thing. Regardless of what setback you might be experiencing, not letting that hold you down for an extended amount of time because that's how the late Bob Proctor talked about depression being the lowest vibration and the lowest frequency possible. Moments that you're in that depressed state, you're not moving. You're not moving forward.

Isaac Mashman18:04

To stop and think about that for a second because I think there's a conversation between balancing your life and balancing a business and treating a business. I think that a lot of entrepreneurs go wrong by treating their business like a side hustle or like a hobby. So you have to actually treat it like something you spend time at every single day regardless. Talking about resiliency with energy is also I'm directly talking about resiliency with business. If you get told something or something isn't working, you're consistently changing. Again, part of the reason why it dissolved my firm and launched something better was I saw a problem within the structure that I could improve and do something differently and do something better.

So I constantly pivoted and when I talked about my story earlier, Kevin, about how after high school and going into network marketing, I went through literally half a dozen plus businesses from multiple MLM companies to doing a record label and managing music talent, to wanting to do drop shipping, to God knows what else. Every single time I moved on from something, I was pivoting and making a lateral and a vertical change. So not being stuck in something. But once you find something that you're naturally good at, when I was down in Miami, a few years ago at a conference, I heard Steve Harvey speak. He said, the one thing that you need to do is find your gift.

You need to find something that God has naturally blessed you with, something that you're able to do easily and the thing of less effort. So once I realized that, okay, I don't want to do this, I'm good at this, people come to me for this advice. People are naturally reaching out to me, then I was able to take hold of that idea and build a brand around it and build a business around it. That's that's where I got into the consulting space and specifically for personal brands. Because I'm not your business guy when it comes to business branding, but I am your personal brandy guy. Yeah, absolutely.

Isaac Mashman20:30

What are your thoughts there? Well, I think it's naturally going to suck. At first launch it's going to be rough and that's okay but as you go through and you see, all right, well maybe I should change this font. Maybe I should update this post. My website could be better with these colors. So I think initially having an idea of what you want it to represent. So for example, with my business, I knew that I was going to have a black and white color scheme. I wanted it to be premier and luxurious. I wanted it to be bold but not too corporate. I wanted it to feel like something that you could trust.

With my personal brand, I know that a lot of times I talk about personal branding or business or podcasting or writing a book, but I also have a balance of putting out personal content. So a really simple strategy to maintain consistency is what I call the Skyline strategy. So you're building the skyline of your personal brand. So you, for every two posts that are business related, that would push you forward, help you make money, establish credibility, establish you as a thought leader. You do one post that is personal. So that this would be about your interests, about what you're spending time doing, that sort of thing.

So it's a two to one. Then when it comes to maintaining that consistent tone, you're not going to just treat your social media pages or what you're doing, like a normal person on Facebook. You're not going to repost every single recipe you see. You're not going to repost all of the, maybe events that are local to you. You might take and be a little bit more reserved. Again, do you want to be a person who's locally known or internationally an icon? That's something that you need to ask yourself. From there, doing things that protect your brand because it takes literally years, at times, hundreds of years for a tree to be grown.

Think about the biggest oak tree. It's hundreds of years. But I could go with a couple of guys in a chainsaw and cut down that tree in less than a day. So that's very similar to your reputation and to your brand. You need to make sure that what you're doing has purpose and intent behind it. I don't mean that in some me, Che, way, but every single thing that you're doing can either connect the audience, it can entertain them, it can educate them, or it can motivate them. So asking yourself those questions and understanding what that purpose of that content is before you post it is going to make sure that you don't do anything that could potentially harm you.

Isaac Mashman23:23

Well, Kevin, if you're thinking about authenticity, you're not being authentic. Because if you're thinking about how can I be more authentic, you're initially trying to manipulate it. So you're trying to manipulate and fabricate an image. So being authentic is as simple as, well, putting yourself out there and not overthinking it. Again, now you do have to ask questions. For example, if you're building a business, you might not want to be as politically active as somebody who's in the political space. Because anytime there's a division, there's something that's divisive, it can become, again, harmful to your brand. Or it can also be helpful. Turn off some people, you'll turn on other people.

But when you're trying to be authentic, not obsessing and not thinking about what you're doing is going to be your best friend as ironic as that sounds. Because otherwise, it's all just going to be fabricated.

Isaac Mashman24:28

Well not being too cliche, not being too corporate and not being too impersonal. Here's what I mean by that. So in my own personal, again talking about personal brands, in my profiles I say addicted to coffee and standards I help create, maintain and scale unrivaled personal brands. Now what did I start with? I started with a fact about me, something that could build rapport with the audience member. So when somebody comes to your profile for the first time or is looking you up, they are going to have a bunch of initial impressions. If they see, oh, I'm a coach that I help people make $60,000 in 30 days kind of thing, that doesn't tell the person on the other end of the screen anything about that person why they should work with him.

But if they said father of five from homeless to millionaire, now you know that that person is a father, they were homeless and now they're rich. Okay. Is cliche and we could fine tune it even more to say loving father of five five and then we could say some homeless with a pregnant girlfriend so a millionaire something like that. You could you could add and take away details that make your story better because you've already lived the story now you need to leverage it you could leverage any aspect of your life and turn it into a piece of content and so with your specific marketing message that needs to have something personal, a personal hook, and then a well-defined professional outcome.

So addicted to coffee and standards, I help create maintained and scale on rival personal brands. Or in your case, you could say cerebral palsy advocate, and then you could say an interest, whatever that interest would be like, I like the outdoors or something like that. Then you could say speaker, podcast, host and life changing coach. There are so many different things that you could do to position yourself and then market yourself.

Isaac Mashman27:06

I think it's quintessential and I think that that's a vital part of who you are. I mean one of the best ways to get booked on more gigs is to have a media kit and to have something that has all the information about you to make it easy for another person to come to a decision and to say alright, okay I had a question about this. What can he speak on or what are some of his presentation titles and you give them a media kit that has all that listed out that saves you time, saves them time and helps them come to a decision faster.

So coming up with again a speaker statement or a professional statement, it's the same thing as developing your marketing message and developing a pitch ultimately. It's like, yeah, you could just be a speaker, but what are the outcomes for the audience and why would they choose you? It's quintessential, Kevin.

Isaac Mashman28:25

Absolutely. Again, part of that decision was growing up in a lower income household to where I didn't go and get my teeth fixed. Kids had braces. I didn't have braces or going and seeing, oh well, I got to go to school wearing the Walmart shoes. Nowadays, Walmart has some pretty cool shoes. But back then when I was in middle school and high school, I didn't feel good going to school wearing Walmart shoes. So part of it was the decision to make a different life for myself and for my family. Also to realize that man, I want to get my money to work for me too.

If I'm going to have a portfolio and I'm going to live this life, I don't want to just have a 401k, I want to get paid by my investments. I want to be able to do things that allow me more freedom and partly because I think it's fun. I think building this entire thing for as painful and as funky as it is at times, the overarching theme is building something enjoyable and building something that you could have fun with. If you're pursuing financial freedom, again, you have to define what that looks like for you. Some people might think $100,000 a year is financially free. Other people might define it as a million dollars a month and $12 million a year.

So defining that and then reverse engineering what you need to do to get there is going to be the step that you need to take. So for example, over the next decade, I know that I want to have a nine figure business with Mashman Consulting Group. I need to have $100 million in revenue, which isn't out of the question for large consulting firms. The largest ones make billions of dollars every year. Well, I'll need a team of at least a thousand consultants generating, a million dollars per head every.

Isaac Mashman30:20

I think setting the tone and setting the example because you see these people in mind, these are these mentors that you follow and you think, wow, I could be that person. Or you'd be like, wow, how did they get there? I think that being in that position of influence is a blessing, but it's not something I'm intentionally doing. I'm not intentionally trying to be that person who's inspiring you to take change because I understand that I'll naturally do that by self-improvement and by progressing cure. Through my work professionally, I get a lot of enjoyment because I see a person take their ambitions and turn them into their reality, whether that be launching a podcast, publishing their book and proving their socials, whatever that might be.

The other thing that I'll say on that note is it's similar to legacy. I don't care about building a legacy. I'll be dead. But I know that the things that I do throughout life will naturally contribute to that. The kids I have, the businesses I build, the lives I do change, like all of that happens naturally. I think that this obsession with trying to be this perfectly crafted individual can be great but there are certain things that you just shouldn't think about like so I'd be authentic well be yourself. Yeah absolutely and I think I'm curious to ask you about.

Isaac Mashman31:47

Friend? Yeah, I think that it's kind of the same. So let me tell you a story. I recently built a pond. So I built, I didn't think I would ever incorporate this into my life, but I built a pond that's on the patio and I have fish in it and it's beautiful. Every single day I have to feed those fish or those fish will die. So I created a new responsibility for myself that I have to maintain and I have to keep. Building a business is a lot like a fish pond because if you don't feed the fish die. If you don't feed your business, the business dies, the business will dry up.

So as you're doing a business or looking to launch something, I mean even the same thing with launching a podcast, Kevin, you have to be consistent with your show in order for it to grow and for people to come back every single week and listen to your conversations. So going into something with the long haul, I mean most podcasts like literally 80% of podcasts or more do not pass 20 monthly listeners and do not pass 20 episodes. So the fact that you're even past that means that you've beaten up the statistics. So they say that 95% of businesses fail after five years, well, be consistent and the business won't fail because as long as you're progressing and applying action and also adapting, you could apply pressure and apply persistence, but unless you adapt to that change when it comes, which I feel like this overarching conversation is adapting to evolution and evolving when things come your way, when challenges come your way, you're going to be able to say, all right, well, this isn't working.

The sales strategy isn't working. If it's not working for six months, are you going to keep doing the same thing? No, you're going to change and be like, all right, well, why don't I try this instead? That means progress. Progress is a good sign.

Isaac Mashman33:54

I think that it's important if you go into it for the long haul. Otherwise you can leverage the podcast of other people or the alternative media of other people that. I say leverage not in some Machiavellian way, but other people are looking for high quality guests and other people who can come and provide value to their own audiences that they spent years painstakingly building. So I think launching your own show can definitely be a fantastic thing because you're able to connect with other professionals. You're able to show that you're an interviewer. You're able to know that you're somebody who can be trusted and build these relationships every single week.

For example, some of the plot casters that I listened to, when I got some money in my pocket, I was able to purchase from their company for the first time. I dropped $400, $500, it's automatically because I automatically had that relationship with them. I trusted them. I knew the kind of guy he was and hence the kind of products that he would create with his business. So it allows you to build the relationship, build the trust and give you a marketing tool because you're able to run sponsorships, you're able to market every episode. It's just all around a really great opportunity and other forms of media would be, okay, maybe you don't want to do a podcast.

But you should write articles and do your own space there or contribute to high quality media outlets and be a contributor there. All of these things will help you build trust, establish credibility, which are basically synonymous, and have a successful personal brand that gives you results, helps you make money, and helps you promote causes that you care about.

Isaac Mashman35:52

Let's think about... A part of theacle every time a car comes out gets a safety rating. Toyota, Subaru, or consistently at the top when it comes to the safety rating, so who would they market them and appeal to? They would appeal to people and families that are conscientious about the safety of their families. So they'd purchase that. That is a form of brand trust. Before a brand trust would be if you're hosting an event and you have a list of 10 speakers and one of this and they all cost the same. Let's say all the speakers just ironically cost the same amount to book or one could even cost more, but the one that costs more has done a dozen more speaking engagements.

They have been in the business longer. They have more results, more testimonials. That means that that company that's looking to pay for a speaker is likely going to go to the person who has the most experience because they have trust. Because the trust, professionally speaking, even in relationships, if you ask your friend for help, you trust that your friend is going to show up. That's trust on a personal level and then on a professional level, you trust that a service is going to be rendered. At the moment that that service isn't rendered and that trust is broken, then your reputation just took a hit, which impacts everything across the board.

Isaac Mashman37:50

I think sometimes decompressing is essential and this is something I've struggled with my entire life too whether it's a significantly high standard of no I got to be I got to see in school like that's not good enough we're launching a business and consistently beating myself up I think that understanding that there's a healthy balance between a little bit of negative reinforcement and versus being abusive to yourself that's something I'm working on. So I'm not really a great guy to speak on that because I'll beat myself up all the time. But I do, I've recently rather come to the conclusion that there are times where I might need to take some time and decompress and get on track.

This is, long term, most entrepreneurs are some, they have some form of neurodivergency. I think that being prone to certain, maybe depressions or things like that, but then again, you could find anything to be depressed about. So I'm not letting it hold you back is important, but then you can say that that's just what all guys say. All guys are like, ah, don't happen to the emotions. So I think that finding and having as a man, one other friend, not two, not three, one, one other friend, one other guy friend specifically that you can confide in is quintessential because I have that guy for me.

His name is actually Kevin funny enough. Having that one person you can confide in allows you to make refuge just like if you were to pray to.

Isaac Mashman39:46

Kevin you have done an extensive amount of research you remind me of a Nard War who interviews musicians I want to be surprised if you know my family name and everything. So I have personal branding and manifesto and fame and influence this is the first edition which I published in 2021. The main philosophy of it is, well, I want to do establish the philosophy of personal branding and actually break down what it is and why you should be building it. It's less strategic and more philosophical. So the second edition, I'm going to expand on all of the same details and say, all right, well, what is your personal brand?

Why you should be building it? How you can brand yourself and then how you can get there? Now, it doesn't matter. It doesn't dive into social media techniques or using Instagram or Facebook because I feel like there are a lot of books that have been written that even a decade ago work phased out because the algorithm changed. So I want to talk about how relationships work, how branding works, how credibility works, how leverage works and all of these other details. So somebody can say, all right, well, it doesn't matter what marketing vehicle I'm using or what is in front of me. I know that I need to establish rapport and connection.

I need to build trust. I need to leave a lasting impression of increase I need to ask for a testimonial and they have all these things that they can implement regardless of what technology comes out any balls and. So that's coming out in fall of two thousand twenty four and my other book is available on is a @isaacmashman dot com for slash book.

Isaac Mashman42:02

Yeah, it's fascinating. This is something coming into this because when I first booked it, I didn't realize that you had cerebral palsy. I didn't realize that. But then at the more I was looking to your store, I'm like, wow, what could I do to actually provide an even more value for him and his audience right now? A couple of weeks ago, I had a Paul, a consultation with a client of mine who was in the military, was in the air force, and got into a horrible car accident. He was actually on a motorcycle to make it even worse, and he lost all of his sense of smell, and he's pretty much 100% blind.

I was thinking, man, why don't you use artificial intelligence to help you move forward? I pulled out chat GPT and how it has the voice and the conversational AI interface. I was like, no, if you had to do research or come up with something, you could literally speak to this AI and it would be able to help you. I think as workplaces, AI in and of itself is displacing a lot of people. But the people that will not be displaced are the people who can use artificial intelligence. So I think that as companies become more conscientious about how they can make their workplaces inclusive, while using AI and having people with disabilities who might not be able to do physical labor, for example, as like working on digging a post hole, well, you could still use AI to create results for the company.

Then you still can be the expert. You can read all of the books. You're there. I think that when it comes to a business, finding ways that they can adapt, even as simple as having a website that has multiple contrast modes or has alternative text. Working with my client, I'll make sure that every single image I upload on my website now has an alt text on it. So when he's using his phone, the alt text will naturally read off, oh, this is a photo of Isaac Mashman in X, Y and Z or this is a photo of a corporate event, whatever it might be. So it can create the image.

I think that pursuit of inclusivity is a great way. I think that AI is going to be the thing that makes it even easier for people moving.

Isaac Mashman44:36

The thing without expectation, I think that that's a big thing. So sometimes I'll give advice for free. I'll give somebody advice and I'm not necessarily looking for anything in response to that, but I want to see them win. I understand that I have all this knowledge. It's not like it's not costing me anything, so to speak, to help somebody out if they have a question, but I think that relationships without expectations are really great. Obviously you have a standard in place. I'm not talking about an expectation of not having standards. You need to have standards of who you're talking to and who you're spending time with.

But I'm talking about, hey, if my best friend needed help doing something in manual labor for an entire day, I wouldn't think twice I would go out and help. I think that old Americana feel of like giving your neighbors a pie kind of thing or house warming gifts, we need to make a resurgence of that because those little acts and those little gestures are what really shows somebody that you care.

Isaac Mashman45:51

Absolutely, and Kevin, it's been an absolute pleasure to be on and have this conversation with you. You can find me across all social media at Isaac Mashman as well as go into my website like @isaacmashman.com and that has everything there. For my companies, you could go to Mashman.org.

Isaac Mashman46:35

Absolutely Kevin and anything you ever need. Reach out.