How to Build a Powerful Personal Brand in 2025

Isaac Mashman7:26

What's going on? Yeah, man. Thank you for the invitation. For going.

Isaac Mashman7:34

I can be out already. Did I get that?

Isaac Mashman7:38

Rude. No, man. It's funny because you were like, I don't know how I'm going to start this off. Then you go into this amazing sermon. So it's like, it's just impressive, man. I know that you've had a long day, but excited to be here for the conversation and you don't talk.

Isaac Mashman9:31

Yeah, man. I would actually share a client horror story and it took me a while to even feel comfortable talking about this. But a couple of years ago when I was running my public relations firm, we were doing a retainer model to where you would lock arms with us for an entire year. I'd personally consult you and help you with your personal brand. I was so on fire for this guy. I wanted to do anything in my power to go above and beyond. But the one thing about consulting, similar to coaching, is that it is a two-way street. You have an obligation to deliver on your strategy, on your promises.

They also have an obligation to deliver for you and to listen and to take your advice and to implement the homework and the different things that you're telling them that they need to do in order to see results. Otherwise, what are you paying them for? Right? I had this client who was really excited about working with me and it was a relatively new relationship and he decided to pay pretty much the entire year upfront over the span of like two months, Christmas days, 75,000 bucks. At the time I was like, damn, that's significant. That's really big. Coming from a place where my mom would have had to work three months for $12,000.

Over the span of probably eight consultations and more consultations and what was originally agreed upon because he needed that additional support. One day he sent me an email and he's like, I want to refund. I'm thinking to myself, what do you mean? I'm like, you haven't listened, you haven't done anything. One thing led to another. I could have done things better on my side. Absolutely. I could have handled it better. I could have adhered to things better. But the thing is I knew from the bottom of my heart, I showed up for him. I was like, hey, record one video talking about X, Y, and Z for real estate.

He never listened. He never did it. That was disheartening to me because then I see his lack of results. I'm thinking, is it a reflection of me? Do I need to fly out to the dude and hold his hand or kiss his ass? What do I need to do for him to listen? Needless to say, it escalated. He went on to harass me, my associates, my fiancee, like, hey, get Isaac to follow up with me. It was horrible to the point where I had a lawyer literally send him a cease and assist and threatened to press criminal charges for misdemeanor harassment in the state of Arkansas.

That sent me down an entire spiral with that business and part of the reason why I dissolved it and part of the reason why I just kind of lost that passion for it, I was like, all right, this isn't it. I remember one day and I was laying in bed sleeping in and my fiance said, hey, wake up, you're the CEO. I'm like, I didn't feel anything at all. I didn't feel anything. That ultimately led me to a year later launching Mashman Consulting Group and publicly dissolving Mashman Ventures, my public relations firm, and then going 100% into the deep end on consulting because I ran away from that title.

I thought that I had to have some more success. But then when you have enough people wanting your help or coming to you or opportunity seeking you out, you realize, hey, maybe I do have something to offer. That's key. So through this day, I still have those moments of doubt sometimes, but then I look at the results and I run a Google search. I'm like, all right, maybe I do have something to say here. So that moment, man, required me to really crawl from the pits of hell. To this day, he's on my shit list where I'll buy his mom's house in the future and bulldoze it, turn it into a garden, name it after my grandmother. I have a list, man.

Isaac Mashman14:37

Yeah, well, I think falling onto your successes is a really good, your successes are there to lift other people up and to prove something, but I think more so, it's also to lift yourself up. So you could go and look at your own results that you've done for yourself and whatever that field that you're coaching, consulting, or providing a service on in, or you could just remind yourself by watching those testimonials, man, or looking through those case studies. That was something I did do. It took me taking some deals and taking things that I didn't necessarily want to take to rebuild that confidence and taking those baby steps.

But it's like, when you start out, you're not charging 5,000 or 2,500 or anything for a service. You're starting out at the very bottom more times than not. It's kind of the same way rebuilding confidence. So those stepping stones, like you're out of the gym for a year. Yeah, it's going to take you six months to get back into the flow of things. If you've been out of the gym for a month, it might take you a week, but if you're out for a year, it's going to take you much longer. I think reminding yourself of those successes and just continuing to be persistent, which is really a word that's been on my mind quite a lot lately of just persistence.

The second thing is discipline. It's like, it does not matter how you feel, man. Coming where I come from, with a lack of positive male role models outside of church to a degree, I suppose. Yet every guy at church was overweight and fat, and then in Boy Scouts, it's not like the military members, my scout leaders were living ultra successful lives that they really wanted to lead. So I lack that role model for discipline in my life and as an adult, that's something that I've been constantly seeking. That's why I look for those more masculine role models that I can listen to that tell you, hey, stop being a little whiny bitch.

Think about Andy Fursella. I think he's a good example of listening to him for years because he tells me the honest truth that I don't want to tell myself sometimes or that nobody else, you could tell your wife or your fiancee some of the talk that you give to yourself in your head. She's like, oh my God, he's suicidal and that's not it. It's like, this is how I need to talk and how I really know I need to behave in order for me to step it up because who else is going to do it for me, nobody?

Isaac Mashman18:31

I'm extremely lazy and that's part of the reason why I got involved in business is so I could have the ability to choose for myself and we all have freedom but what we're looking for is more options. You know more money means more options not necessarily more freedom and we're in America, like you have the freedom to do whatever the hell you want. So I think my biggest downfall has always been laziness, which manifests in the lack of discipline and oh, I don't feel like it, exactly what you just said and you know, sleep is a big one. Then like the other thing is I suppose thinking about alternative solutions if I make the excuse and that's a little bit deep.

So let me go ahead and go through this. Let me go ahead and say, oh, if I don't do this today, then I know that I could go ahead and I could still follow up with them tomorrow. Like I know that I could do this and that and trying to predict responses and that really doesn't do anything positive except create more anxiety for yourself. Right? Because now you're trying to predict things and it's like you're not God, man. So it's like it's better to just do it and one of the best pieces of advice, to mention Andy a second time is he said like there isn't anything known as a difficult conversation.

They're just conversations that we place meaning to. We build those things up in our brain. It's huge because I can think about multiple times in my life where I've created so much stress and then the moment I speak up and get it off, it flowed easily easily. Then I felt a million times better whether that be dealing with a tough client, asking for the refund request or rejecting them for the refund request or holding your ground. So yeah, man, that's a little bit of a long-winded question, not exactly three, but laziness that manifests in the lack of discipline and then reasoning with myself. So those are things that I'm working to kind of get through.

I suppose really finding that grit in myself again, that I had when I was that cocky, arrogant young guy who was figuring things out, I'm bringing a little bit of that back this year. A little bit more of that to kind of keep me with that tenacious kind of gritty edge.

Isaac Mashman24:34

Yeah. Well, every single person who's ever walked the face of this planet from Jesus Christ to Adolf Hitler, to Barack Obama, to Donald Trump, to Gandhi, to Adam and Eve, to Moses, to Noah, to King James and King Charles, whatever, every single one of these people have had a personal brand. But the thing is, it wasn't called that. It wasn't called personal branding. The entire term personal brand is relatively new. It was coined in 1997 by a management consultant called Tom Peters. He went to an article for a fast company called the brand called you. Imagine that. He talked about personal branding in terms of the CEO of Nike or the CEO of Adidas or any other corporation or executive is able to leverage and brain themselves to be that face of that business.

Then people are going to be following them or reaching out to them, consultants are a great example that he used in talking about how like consulting firms like McKinsey, you have these high paid network consultants that have super high profit, very low overhead. From there over the past three decades since that article in 1997, it's really taken off and it's become this commodity of a word to where everybody just wants to say it because I think it sounds good. This is also a flaw that personal branding has today, formally, is there is no formal training. There's no certification. There's no education. There's no high school course.

There's no college course. There's no doctorate. Edward Bernays, the father of public relations, criticized public relations later on in his life. For the exact same reasons I'm criticizing personal branding. He said that anybody can call himself a public relations professional. I feel the same way with personal branding or anybody can call himself a personal branding professional, but that means absolutely jack shit. So let's define what personal branding is. It very simply is you, it's who you are. Every single thing about your character, your story, your pain, your struggle, your trauma, your successes, your failures, your relationships, your characteristics, your interests, all of those things, make up your personal brand.

Then you also have the professional characteristics of you and your career. You combine that personal hook with those professional punchlines. You have what I call Identity Positioning™. That's really talking about how you can position yourself as a public figure and not just for what you're providing in terms of your service and what you're known for professionally, but for what you're providing as the individual. Just like a business or brand like Kellogg cereal has deliverables and corn syrup and red dyes and everything else and sugar and diabetes, your personal brand has deliverables as well. You set an expectation every single time you go live for the Ron and scripted podcast, you're setting an expectation and what the guest is going to provide what you're going to provide.

Then what the person listening and tuning in is also going to receive. You create those deliverables. So your personal brand is a testament of you, it's accumulation of you. It's also something that works for you 24, 7, 365, and it supersedes your death. Your personal brand, just like matter, is never created nor destroyed. Well, guess what your personal brand is created, but it's never truthfully destroyed because your 20th great grandfather existed somewhere throughout history. You could dig deep and probably find out his name if you really wanted to. But just because he's dead or 28 generations gone doesn't mean he didn't exist and didn't have a personal brand and it contributes something in the society that he lived in.

So now my big focus is setting that formal training, setting what it means to be an ethical, personal brand leader and professional. Then also helping educate people and kind of applying the first philosophy of personal branding that's so much bigger than just the executive, but it could be the high school student, the employee, the entrepreneur, anybody.

Isaac Mashman31:10

What's interesting because being the same person you present yourself online and in person is really quintessential because how many times would you be following probably some Instagram guru? If you were to meet them in person, or it's like the person who talks crap on the internet, but you meet them face to face and they run away scared. It's like, you talk to people. Stories for days, dude, stories. We're asking in real life, and it's kind of humorous, Steven mentioned that, but I would say before we can, can even have the conversation about what you're providing. What service or what solution, you're, you're recognized in. We need to go a step deeper and ask why are you even trying to build your personal brand or why are you trying to build a business?

There's three reasons why and this is just what like what I would tell a client on a consultation I'd ask them these questions. It's really important to understand because it can help, number one, provide clarity in terms of the strategy. If, for example, your one goal is vanity. You just want to be vain. You want to be famous because you want to. Why not see that a lot in the music space, especially? It's not even about money and music. It's about fame. It's about cloud. It's about energy. It's about being recognized or getting the girls or whatever it might be. But if you want to be vain, well, okay, let's go ahead and throw some gimmicky marketing out there and you could go viral.

What do you do? Like you could do prints. Like it's not difficult to become famous. It is difficult to become influential. There are big differences there. Then the second reason why is mission. So you're somebody who's more purpose driven. You want to change the world. You see this a lot with billionaires who have a lot of success. Then they devote that money and resources to philanthropy or things and causes that they care about. Then the final thing is money. This is really the simplest one. It's also where most people fall under. You can have a combination of all three motivators. I know myself, I feel driven by all three.

Deep down in my soul, I have no issue saying, yeah, I'm a little bit vain. Yeah, I want money. Yeah, I do have some sense of purpose because I want to prove everybody wrong on the internet who's talking about buying fake press and botting their accounts. So understanding why you're trying to build your personal brand or building your business. So money, mission, or vanity. Then from there, looking in reverse engineering, other successes and finding and following those strategies and just, compounding those results. It might take you five years of building your personal brand and doing podcast interviews or having a podcast or sending 100 pitches out to a reporter, which honestly will never happen.

You will never send 100 pitches and not get one reply. Like you will get a couple of replies if you don't have a horrible pitch. Both chat GBT, there's no reason why you're trash anymore. So once you answer those questions, then we could talk about, all right, well, what do you want to be known for? That goes into the next thing about auditing somebody's personal brand to where they're at. It's like, well, what do you want to be known for? Do you want to be the entertainer? Do you want to be the educator? Do you want to be the motivator? Like what is your business and your profession? Then we could talk about positioning and highlighting, successes or unique selling points and all that good stuff.

Isaac Mashman37:41

That's really an interesting question because at the end of the day, what branding and marketing is is all manipulation. In the branding and marketing space who will really want to tell you that. But at the end of the day, you're trying to manufacture an outcome. Edward Bernays says, manufacturing consent. You are trying to convince somebody to make a decision. They're subconscious mind. You're not speaking to their logic. You're speaking to their emotion, their heart to their soul in some cases. Especially some of the more theological people. I've seen this resurgence or new creation of marketing gurus who are talking about, are you a Christian business owner.

It's like they're using that as a crutch to try to generate revenue and I'm like you're no worse than Joel Osteen. But when you're talking about perception, you have to pick and choose what you want to show and how transparent you want to be. The minister, right, to go along with the example of religion, the minister shouldn't be seen drinking alcohol at a bar. Shouldn't be seen at a strip club. If you're a business owner, does it matter if you're drinking alcohol? Well, maybe. What do you want your bit? How much do you want to show? How are you trying to be perceived? It's not about trying to withhold information to lie or misguide somebody into who you are.

But there's this fine balance between what is the intent behind sharing this? A piece of content can do one of four things or a combination of all four. A piece of content can connect. It connects you with the other person. A piece of content can motivate or inspire so it gets somebody to take action or feel a certain kind of way. It can educate them, teach them something new or it can entertain them and it can make them feel good. Understanding what your intention is behind what you are sharing allows you to have a little bit more clarity in terms of what you're looking to achieve as an ROI.

So for example standing out of my office today, I took a photo of the skyscraper where my office is at, I put a black and white filter on it. The intention of that is very simply to show that I'm not dead because I haven't been producing a lot of content because I've been working on the second edition of my book. So I was like, let me just take a really quick photo. It doesn't need to be anything special. Put a little bit of a sound clip there. So now it shares my sound taste. It can make an establishment for there. But understanding why you're putting out content in the ways that you are will help you kind of avoid this pitfalls of like, you might not want to take a photo of you out at a bar before Easter Sunday.

It's like, it's like, it's like, these are the decisions that you have to think about because at this point, you are establishing yourself as a public figure as a growing celebrity, even potentially in some cases. Celebrities have PR teams that are telling them what to post and what not to post. They're talking with them through the risks, they have things that they're cleaning up. It's really a matter of how big do you want to take this? How big do you want your personal brand to be? So the figure that you're talking about is probably the exact, I'm not going to mention his name because neither of us want to get sued for defamation.

But I believe I saw him in 2019 in an event, and I don't remember one thing from his event. Ironically, I remember Tai Lopez's speech over his own. Imagine that. I learned more from a guru than an actual motivational speaker. But again, it's like these are people who have a certain playing field, but they're not household names like Dwayne the Rock Johnson, or a politician, or Donald Trump, or Barack Obama. So it's like there's a hierarchy of levels of, do you want to just be known in your local community? Do you want to be known on a state level? Do you want to be known in front of millions of people?

Or do you just want to be known in your industry? Identifying a little bit again and asking yourself what the purpose is behind building your personal brand helps you kind of answer those more nuanced questions of.

Isaac Mashman44:57

I'm going to answer it in the school of thought about what you want to showcase in terms of your personal brand. We're entering into a conversation that's actually quite challenging of you don't want to share everything about your personal life because then there's no mystery. If you share everything about your personal life, it doesn't give anybody anything to wonder about. Then it also suffocates your credibility and the thing that's actually generating you money or making you a success in your business and career. So the best thing that I've come up with and that I've surmised is a two to one ratio. Now, this is called the skyline strategy.

You think about building a city skyline, you have all these great skyscrapers. It's like these are different buildings that make up the city that you live in. I believe content is one of the vehicles, whether that content is written in articles, video content, podcasts, short form vertical videos, still photos, captions, everything, all of it is content. So for every two business posts, things that are pushing your credibility, your awareness, your exposure, your money forward in a positive direction, you incorporate one photo or one piece of content that showcases who you are. It could be you at a coffee shop, it could be you out of dinner, it could be you with a photo of somebody at an event.

Whatever it is, it showcases a little bit about your personality and why that's important is your personality and those characteristics is what establishes rapport, what is rapport, it is trust. If you could build trust, then again, going back to the livables of your personal brand, the expectation increases, and then people are going to be more loyal to you. You will have a faithful following, just like all of the wonderful people who are commenting on your show on a random night and during the week, that's late. They're taking their time out of their night to watch us tuba foons talk. Contributing and making comments. But there's a reason for that.

So I would say that in terms of your passions and life experiences, I think that if you're trying to build out your personal brand, talking about some of those experiences, or I know that the, I believe your name is Dory, talking about domestic abuse, well, talking about some of those experiences as painful as they might be, but not just sharing them out of like some victimhood, but sharing them out of the lessons that you've learned, or what could have been avoided. Then you could help reach and help so many other women I avoid the similar situations and I've used this example before. Some of the best public speakers are members or people who have come from abuse, who have come from trauma. Think about Les Brown, for example, Les Brown stuttered and he became a wonderful motivational speaker that I've.

Isaac Mashman50:49

Man, I'm just getting warmed up. Like you wanted to explore long form podcasts, let's go. No, I'm really easy to find. You can find me at @isaacmashman.com, my personal website. You could go to Google and type in my name. It's really simple. It's the biblical spelling and Mashman in the SHMA in.

Isaac Mashman51:10

To make sure I got it right. ISAAC. It's amazing how many people literally spell it as, is SAC. I'm like, I'm not a SAC, please don't do that.

Isaac Mashman51:20

Hate that. But I'm really easy to find. You can't be in the personal branding space. If you can't be found, I think that would be tragic and fraud-like. So really enjoy the conversation, man. I think we could have easily gone on for probably another hour with how we're going.

Isaac Mashman51:39

Yeah, and that's the Mashman Consulting Group. That's my firm I launched earlier this year, last year now, already in 2025. You can go there. I have a really cool AI chat bot that we've created called KPI. If you go and fill out a few questions, it'll take you to exclusive overview presentation, take it to an onboarding survey and everything else. You'd like to work with me or another consultant as we scale the team.