Where Are They Now, Part 3: Isaac Mashman

Isaac Mashman0:54

So Isaac, welcome back. ST, man, honored to be here celebrating an awesome milestone with you man. You've been doing the show for quite some time now. Great to be here.

Isaac Mashman1:12

Talk about the latest updates. Yeah undoubtedly so and it's been cool to kind of witness your growth as well the launch of your book and some other thing the business and some personal.

Isaac Mashman1:56

Walk me through your venture itself. Well, yeah, you mentioned briefly the podcast. So I ended Chase the Vision with Isaac Mashman after a hundred episodes in June of 2022. If you're listening to this now, what the time of date, the show might be out or I might be in the early stages of launching it. But I'm watching a brand new show in February of 2024, which I'm very excited about. It'll be a little bit less business focused and more emphasis on personal branding, entertaining, as well as merging that niche of celebrity to be able to talk with celebrity figures about their own successes, what worked, didn't work.

I'm just, I'm very excited about that. So I'll be launching that after literally a year and a half away from being in the podcasting world, which I'm excited to get back in and really take it more seriously. I'll be moving this upcoming year and so potentially getting a really nice podcast studio going. I have a lot of different ideas for that. Then in terms of Mashman Ventures, I'm still at that still building out my public relations firm. As a matter of fact we've put a big emphasis on establishing the corporate image lately and building the, I suppose take a pretty whatever you launch a startup, whenever you launch any business.

It takes on a life of its own. As a small business owner, there's a certain point to where pretty much you are the driving force of your business. Then as you hire people, as you bring contractors on, as you get clients hell and people start referring to your business as they versus he helped me or she held me. They're actually talking about this is a separate entity, you're really able to play around with the image and build it into something great. So we're really focusing on expansion and a couple of different areas, fine tuning your offer fine tuning, really in breaking down when we spoke, I didn't even have the training platform done yet.

So right now, Mashman Ventures has a three part business model, PR retainer, public relations firm, right, consultancy and then training platform. So a lot of really exciting stuff like it's like an hour about.

Isaac Mashman4:44

Absolutely. I can tell just in your confidence of being able to speak, I don't know, it's anybody listening, if you've ever been on the other side, where you're the person asking questions or keeping the conversation flowing, it can be very challenging sometimes. I think back to when we first started and speaking, and there was a lack of confidence there that you've now since developed. So I'm proud of that. With your personal brand, you're building your personal brand regardless. So why not take control of it and actually consciously get in front of it? That's the big thing that I think I've spoken about more than any other subject over the past year, which is, if you're going to have it, you might as well use it, and you might as well get control of it. Otherwise, it's just going to sit there and go to waste.

Isaac Mashman5:54

Which is good and they all serve a different purpose yet they're connected because they're connected to you. So you can be, I was thinking about this several weeks back when I had the idea of writing a fiction book myself. I'm by no means going to be known as the fiction writer Isaac Mashman, that's not what I'm going for. I'm thinking to myself, I've already written a nonfiction book what's preventing me from maybe being creative pushing out a fictional book just because. If you look at a lot of the major people that we follow the celebrities, the entertainers, the public figures, they all are multi-faceted creators.

They're not just an actor, they're also a business owner, they're also a poet, they're also on Broadway, they've also written a book, or they've done some form of media, or they've done something that is outside of the one branch that they might have exploded in. That's really interesting because you don't have to put yourself in such a box. I feel like a lot of people put themselves in a box and I myself did that to thinking, oh, if I did this, then that would affect my brand. You should always be aware of how something might influence and impact it, but that doesn't mean you necessarily need to not do it because you're afraid, oh, this might make me appear as if I'm not a business owner. No, it's an aspect of you that could actually connect with somebody on a much deeper level.

Isaac Mashman7:28

In terms of person or in terms of career, because I'm going to think about career, I think like.

Isaac Mashman8:00

That's how it makes yourself. I almost think though, from a civilization standpoint, if you think back, you always had maybe in terms of a tribe, you had the one hunter, you had the one person who, or specific roles that were entailed. I think that the rise of industry and the rise of civilization and technology to become advanced, that came with it a series of specializations to where we're almost going against maybe we don't need to know everything. We don't need to know how to farm the land because we can go to the grocery store and use the money that we got from our specialty to buy the food that we would otherwise have to have farmed.

So it's interesting how now at the rise of our civilization, the podcast is next in time. Well, time has created and changed humanity's behaviors from now we don't need to know everything. We very simply need to know how to take our one thing and get everything else we want. So yeah, it's an interesting conversation to think of.

Isaac Mashman9:28

All that? Well, it's not so much working with the corporation, but working with the business owner behind it. So one client that I'm working with Marvin Kaufman, he's a medium sized business owner, not small business, but he has an entire team there. So how can we build out your personal brand while also leveraging the personal brands of the employees? So you're talking about internal marketing, which is something not many people are talking about yet. But just like if you think about the early 2010s, the agency space was very big of saying, oh, start a social media agency, start infotainment, products, et cetera. Then everybody now is jumping onto personal brands, leverage your personal brand.

You have more and more personal brand and consultants out there, it's becoming a little bit more hyper-competitive. But then you think about what the next five years and the next decade might be. I think that more corporations are beginning to understand that if they are not maintaining a positive image with their workforce, they're not going to be able to maintain a positive optics look from a shareholders perspective or from a public image. So if you have a corporation as a thousand employees, you have a thousand people that can market your company for you. You think about the real estate agent that you choose to buy your house, they were probably a part of a different agency.

You knew that agency, whether it's Keller Williams or whatever, whatever it might be, EXP, you know that that agent is associated with that business and there comes a degree of trust from being incorporated with that company or being associated with it. Then that agent is able to say, hey, I am an agent of this company. When they're promoting that and building up the corporate image. So one of the big focuses that I want to take is working with some larger businesses and entities to leverage internal marketing. This would be a fantastic thing to start speaking from stage about, which is something I'm looking to do after the new year as well.

Isaac Mashman11:17

Ventures? Man, a lot of momentum. When I say by momentum, it's not just I want to get a certain revenue target. But I want to get it self-sustaining, completely self-sustaining to where I have plenty of people that know who I am, know who the company is that are able to work with the infotainment products and work with the programs we have through the training program and the training platform and continue growing the resources there because every resource, everything you create is an extension of you. An extension of your company. Then you have artificial intelligence. I mentioned this because this is something that I've recently become very fascinated with.

You can get AI to actually understand and learn based off of your text, based off of your book, based off of your videos and basically digest everything that you've said and spoken about to where it can be an AI language. Model that is an extension of you. So if somebody had a question, what is personal branding, it could directly pull from maybe my book where I say your personal brand is you, it is who you are and be able to answer in real time. So I want to, not only start focusing on the artificial intelligence side of things, but helping people building out their personal brands, understand how AI might need to be incorporated to where if you were to ask Amazon's Alexa, who is this person, would it be able to pull up that information about you?

So a lot of that is with mash from venture specifically and building out clients in the consultancy and the PR retainer and getting that taken care of. But then I have some other endeavors that are outside of that that I could talk about. I'm currently working on a nonprofit initiative out of Ghana. I have somebody there, a guy on Samuel, who I'm locking arms with who's going to be going and we're going to be doing some kind of initiative there. I've matched investments where I'm going to be looking into making some investments into crowd fund ventures after the new year as well as white guys.

As well as why property through property. So I have a million different things and I'm really excited to expand on and really building into a billionaire mark.

Isaac Mashman13:26

Well, it's going to be so funded. So everything for master and ventures, I'll be taking personal capital and even outside of the business, because you can take money directly from the business. Or if you think about the purpose of building out your personal brand, it's to drive revenue. So if I was to take a book sale, I could take that book sale and put that money towards whatever investment. I could take that $5 from the book sale and put that towards AB, an investment through management investments or towards the fund for management properties. I'm not looking to lock arms with people to raise capital together.

That's not the way that I want to operate. That's not the way I like to do business. It's not that I'm against other people, but I'm not in this for democracy. That's not what I'm here for. I'm not here to say, oh, what do you think about this? Now, if I'm building a team, I value their opinion. But I'm not looking to necessarily rely on a capital fund, or if somebody doesn't come up or they come up short, I would rather be able to get it to where I'm basically footing the bill for everything. But by footing the bill, I'm able to keep 100% ownership and from 100% ownership be able to expand and expand and grow.

So for example, asking investments, doing crowd funds. I'm looking for companies that, there are a couple of different ways that I'm planning about going about this. I know that you have a lot of startup founders or people that are interested in startups listening to this. Number one, you can either make investments into a crowd fund or getting advisory shares, Viva Shark Tank style to where we're going to be working with that entity and the executive team and the founder to build out their personal brand in exchange for a small portion of that company. So it might only take 20 hours of my time per year be able to own a sliver of that company and be able to also help boost them up.

The great thing about building out a, feature-rich and a rich portfolio of companies is I'm able to take my investments and anybody who's working with me personally and put them into the Mashman Ventures ecosystem as well. So they're able to equally benefit as if they were a client. So I'm able to incorporate Mashman Ventures in with Mashman Investments and Mashman whatever it is that I'm looking to do that's not really a form of vertical integration and so much as horizontal I'm excited to kind of just build the build the base there. Yeah, I was going to ask.

Isaac Mashman16:19

Of every single thing, but that is ideal. That is absolutely ideal, and I've not had anybody. I've had people come to me with that idea. That would be something that I'll essentially be open to in the future to say, hey, I'd be okay to, in exchange for an equity ownership of this. Or, if you think about real estate, there are so many different avenues here, and one of my favorite people that I listen to, I know a lot of people love great Cardone. I do as well, but there's another guy who's called Ben Mahla. He does a lot of commercial and not corporate real estate in so much as office buildings, but commercial in the sense of shopping malls, shopping strips, centers, et cetera, the kind of businesses that cannot be replaced through Amazon or through internet-based businesses.

So salons, nails, restaurants, like the hole in the wall places. So doing that kind of real estate, but even with that, you can have one person who owns the ground and owns the land, and another person owns the building. So you can be leasing the ground that that building is sitting on. So one of the things that I'm completely signed with is starting out and buying a bunch of vacant lots all around the globe and around the United States, especially like in places like Florida, Arizona, Arkansas, Nevada and buying land and eventually building that up and holding on to it. So for example, the first ever lot that I bought was next to a graveyard in Arkansas and you might think, okay, you're profing off the dead people, but the city might eventually need to expand their graveyard.

I'm going to have a piece of real estate right there that I've been paying property taxes on 25 bucks a year and possibly be able to make 10x just off of holding onto that piece of land. So it's not something that might make me money reoccurring and quote passively, but it's something that is still contributing to my net worth and my portfolio.

Isaac Mashman18:16

I wish you the best of luck. Of course, excellent SDN.