Where Are They Now, Part 3: Isaac Mashman

Isaac Mashman0:54

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

Yeah, undoubtedly so, and it's been cool to kind of witness your growth as well, the launch of your book and some other things, the business and some personal.

Isaac Mashman1:56

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

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

And then as you hire people, as you bring contractors on, as you get clients, and people start referring to your business as "they" versus "he helped me" or "she helped me," they're actually talking about it as a separate entity, and you're really able to play around with the image and build it into something great. So we're really focusing on expansion in a couple of different areas, fine tuning our offer, fine tuning, really, and 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: the PR retainer (the public relations firm), the consultancy, and then the training platform. So a lot of really exciting stuff, [I could talk] an hour about it.

Isaac Mashman4:44

Absolutely. I can tell just in your confidence, being able to speak. I don't know if it's anybody listening, but 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 speaking, and there was a lack of confidence there that you've since developed [past]. 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. 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. But I'm thinking to myself, I've already written a nonfiction book, so what's preventing me from maybe being creative and 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 are all multifaceted 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 too, 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.

Isaac Mashman8:00

That's how [you make] yourself. I almost think, though, from a civilization standpoint, if you think back, you always had, maybe in terms of a tribe, the one hunter, the one person who... or specific roles that were entailed. I think that with the rise of industry and the rise of civilization and technology becoming advanced, there came with it a series of specializations, to where we're almost [saying], 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 had to farm.

So it's interesting how now, at the rise of our civilization (and the podcast is Next In Time), well, time has created and changed humanity's behaviors to where 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 about.

Isaac Mashman9:28

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, is 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 if you think about the early 2010s, the agency space was very big, saying, oh, start a social media agency, start infotainment products, et cetera. And then everybody now is jumping onto personal brands, leverage your personal brand.

You have more and more personal brand consultants out there, and 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 positive optics from a shareholder's perspective or from a public image. So if you have a corporation with a thousand employees, you have a thousand people that can market your company for 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 EXP, whatever it might be. 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. And 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

Man, a lot of momentum. And when I say momentum, it's not just that I want to get to a certain revenue target. I want to get it self-sustaining, completely self-sustaining, to where I have plenty of people that know who I am and 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. And then you have artificial intelligence. I mention 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 also help 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 Mashman Ventures 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 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 named 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 have Mashman Investments, where I'm going to be looking into making some investments into crowdfund ventures after the new year, as well as [buying] property through [Mashman Properties]. So I have a million different things that I'm really excited to expand on, and I'm really building [toward] a billionaire mark.

Isaac Mashman13:26

Well, it's going to be self-funded. So everything for Mashman 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 A, an investment through Mashman Investments, or [B,] towards the fund for Mashman 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 where somebody doesn't come up with it or they come up short. I would rather be able to get it to where I'm basically footing the bill for everything. And 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, Mashman Investments, doing crowdfunds. I'm looking for companies that... there are a couple of different ways that I'm planning on 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 crowdfund or get advisory shares, [kind of] Shark Tank style, 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 to be able to own a sliver of that company and also help boost them up.

The great thing about building out a [feature-rich] and 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 so much as horizontal. I'm excited to just build the base there.

Isaac Mashman16:19

Of every single thing, but that is ideal. That is absolutely ideal. I've had people come to me with that idea. That would be something that I'd essentially be open to in the future, to say, hey, I'd be okay to [do this] 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 Grant Cardone, and I do as well) is another guy called [Ben Mallah]. He does a lot of commercial real estate, not corporate, 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 by Amazon or by internet-based businesses.

So salons, nails, restaurants, 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 who 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 [aligned] with is starting out and buying a bunch of vacant lots all around the globe and around the United States, especially 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 profiting off the dead people, but the city might eventually need to expand their graveyard.

And 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 recurring 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, ST.