Stop Watching and Start Doing in Business

Isaac Mashman1:41

Honored to be amongst these wonderful guests. My name is Isaac Mashman, I'm based out of little Rock, Arkansas, and I run a consulting firm specializing in personal branding and individual reputation management, Mashman Consulting Group. Yeah, it's a really quick overview.

Isaac Mashman8:45

That you play right now yeah I would have to say the poverty mindset the idea that the existence that you were raised with is the existence that you have to live with as an adult, coming from that working class family, single parent household, my grandfather, a carpenter. It was growing up, I might have been eating birdie rice and sloppy joes and such, and I love those things. But that doesn't mean as an adult and in the future with my kids, I want to necessarily feed them the same or I want to do the same or have to worry about the roof leaking. That was a huge, huge shift when I first got started in business, associating with people that were making money, seeing that there was better cars to drive, better houses to live in, better things to do.

Money is ultimately a reflection of you. So if you're naturally a bad person, money's going to exacerbate that compared to if you're a good person, money gives you more ability to do good with it. Getting involved with business and just setting higher standards, higher expectations for what I'm pursuing and what I'm building, because ultimately the more value you provide, the more revenue you make. So there's a direct correlation between doing things ethically. As you mentioned before we even started, I'm having a background in the public relations space. I saw so many people doing the fake rented Rolls Royce, rented Lamborghini by my course kind of crap.

That was always just quick thinking and not having that long-term vision of, I can actually build something that could be a legacy business I passed down to my children. That was a massive shift that as soon as I made it, everything started to click.

Isaac Mashman17:50

Yeah, I could chime in for a second. I believe the recurring theme for the conversation already is self-awareness and understanding where you are currently versus where you want to be. So obviously setting goals and expectations for yourself. It's fascinating because I suppose I'm the outlier of the outliers because the thing that I adopted very early on was I would reverse engineer everybody's success. So coming into the personal branding space in my own business, what I did is I looked at these ultra successful people or what I believed were ultra successful. Then later found out, oh no, all right, maybe this guy isn't as truthful. But I took those strategies that worked for them and I figured if it worked for them, I could duplicate it for myself.

That led me down the road of why not I do podcast interviews or podcast panels such as this, I wouldn't be open to this if I didn't see somebody else, a previous mentor of mine also doing that, or seeing the strategies that work. I believe that's how we ultimately improve and get better and timeframes. Because otherwise you have to spend all of that time making those mistakes, time and time and time again, versus let me look and see what has worked. So I believe it's a little bit less about minding your business and finding what works in other people's business. Adopting that in your own to where you could get results faster, but ultimately understanding where you want to be and where you want to wind up, I think.

Isaac Mashman20:07

Yeah well Niamad there are absolutely hundreds if not thousands of different strategies to grow business, to grow your personal brand, some are more effective than others. I can't say that I stroked a balance that didn't happen. I would spend amounts of time obsessing over one particular thing until I got really good at it. So for example, understanding social media marketing and understanding video content. Then once I understood, okay, let me go out and create a video. This is how I can do it effectively. Let me move on to the next thing. Then that led me to press and then that led me me to podcasting and not necessarily in that order, but understanding these things, getting a good working nature.

I'm not an expert in those things in of itself. Like I can do videos, I can edit videos, I can build my website, but that doesn't mean I am doing that as a business myself. So having that trade where you're not necessarily a master of any of those things. But you're good at them will give you also help you in hiring decisions because you can see other people's expertise and be able to ultimately make better decisions.

Isaac Mashman21:25

There's a difference between copying somebody and being influenced by them. What we see today is a lot of people are copying other people, or I'd, oh, this person recorded this video, let me basically say the same exact thing and post the same, or using their own photos and using a different person's quote. It's like, absolutely not. I do believe that you could take the strategies at face value for how they work and what results they achieve. But that doesn't mean you should copy every single thing about them, you should put your own personal spin.

Isaac Mashman27:51

Right. Sounds like a bad network marketing company.

Isaac Mashman39:49

Corinne's point and just a recurring theme again about us as business owners, we're coming from a position of leverage because we are the people who are providing a solution to another person's problem. A lot of times we let our clients or our prospects take leverage over us by saying no or choosing to go with somebody else or making demands when they're not necessarily in a point to make demands. I say that humbly and with humility, not as, oh, we are better than you, but no, we have something that is tactical, something that is strategic, something that we can help you with. I believe it's really important for us to understand that, because again, we do not have to work with every single person and understanding the level that you want to play at.

Do you want to work with everybody? You want to be mid-market? Do you want to be upper echelon and work with multi-millionaires and gated communities? It's like you have to make these decisions and set the tone for your brand from a high-value branding standpoint of do you want to be a luxury service? Do you want to be a small business service? Do you want to be mid-market? These are the things that you have to think about that we usually don't have conversations about. So I just wanted to make that point really quick because that has driven me insane in the past by working with somebody who was a flying red flag that resulted in a huge fiasco when again now you understand, all right, I don't want to work with that kind of person.

I would rather work with these kind of individuals and kind of just setting the standard in the tone for you and your business will help you attract those higher quality clients long term because you won't be appealing to them. But through social media content, through free training, through resources, whatever you're producing, you can still provide value to those people that wouldn't be ideal clients, but could be clients down the road. So it's really that long-term vision and perspective. Now, in terms of what I'm working on, I'm scaling Mashman Consulting Group. I'm bringing on more personal brand consultants, which I'm really excited about, people who can go out and land clients of their own and help them with their personal brands.

A requirement is that if you want to work with me, you have to be building your own personal brand to a high level yourself because I believe you have to practice what you preach. If we're building a consulting service-based business, we need people who take action and we need clients who take action too. Aside from that, I am on the speaking circuit, so I have an event coming up in about two weeks in front of a 100 plus contractors in Denver, Colorado. Little stressed out about that and all the best ways possible. But it's really good. Again, setting your sights to something and then working to achieve that end goal.

Isaac Mashman42:25

How can they best do that? I am really easy to be found. You could probably find every piece of information about my life story online. You could just run a quick Google search, Isaac Mashman, connect with me on social media or go to my website, Isaac Mashman.com. Awesome.