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 just impressive, man. I know that you've had a long day, but [I'm] excited to be here for the conversation, and you don't talk.

Isaac Mashman14:37

Yeah, well, I think falling back on your successes is a really good [thing]. 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 in whatever field you're coaching, consulting, or providing a service 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 with 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.

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 has 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 wrote an article for Fast Company called "The Brand Called You." Imagine that. He talked about personal branding in terms of how the CEO of Nike or the CEO of Adidas or any other corporation or executive is able to leverage and brand 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: 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, that 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, and 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 Raw & Unscripted podcast.

You're setting an expectation of what the guest is going to provide, what you're going to provide, and 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 an 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 contributed something to 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 is that being the same person you present yourself as 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 even have the conversation about what you're providing, what service or what solution 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 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 in music. It's about fame. It's about clout. 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 [pranks]. 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: money, mission, or vanity. Then from there, looking at and 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. [With] ChatGPT, there's no reason why [your pitches are] 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. [It's] their subconscious mind. You're not speaking to their logic. You're speaking to their emotion, their heart, to their soul in some cases.

Isaac Mashman38:19

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 [brand to be]? 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 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 outside of my office today, I took a photo of the skyscraper where my office is at, and 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 [a statement] from there. But understanding why you're putting out content in the ways that you are will help you kind of avoid these pitfalls, like you might not want to take a photo of you out at a bar before Easter Sunday.

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 [one]. I'm not going to mention his name, because neither of us wants to get sued for defamation.

But I believe I saw him in 2019 at 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.

Isaac Mashman44:57

I'm going to answer it from the school of thought of 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 at 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 deliverables 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 during the week, that's late. They're taking their time out of their night to watch us [buffoons] 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, 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 avoid similar situations, and I've used this example before. Some of the best public speakers are 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.

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 is [M-A-S-H-M-A-N].

Isaac Mashman51:10

To make sure I got it right. ISAAC. It's amazing how many people literally spell it as [I-S-A-C]. 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 I really enjoyed 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 Mashman Consulting Group. That's my firm that 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 an exclusive overview presentation, and then take you to an onboarding survey and everything else, if you'd like to work with me or another consultant as we scale the team.