Bubbles and Biz Wednesday Power Hour with Isaac Mashman

Isaac Mashman1:18

Nicole, glad to be here. Thank you for the last-minute scheduling and the opportunity.

Isaac Mashman1:34

Yes, well, I got my start in the entire entrepreneur space when I was actually in high school back in 2017. I was one of the entrepreneurs who can't say I was a [D or F] student. I was a straight A student, literally on track to go to college with a full-ride scholarship. I was one SAT test away from getting the Bright Futures scholarship. My senior year I decided, man, this might not be the path for me.

Isaac Mashman2:03

I figured that there had to be another path forward. I did what a lot of young entrepreneurs do and got involved with network marketing. I left the industry after a couple of years. I wanted more control over my business and over my future without some executive at the top pulling all of the strings. But I went from business to business, and every single endeavor that I pursued, I was pursuing clarity as well. I was wanting to understand what I liked, what I was good at, what people came to me for, and what had a scalable future. Because I'm big on building a legacy business, I want to build that big Americana brand that could be passed down to my children.

Eventually that led me to personal branding, and I was running a public relations firm, but at the core of the firm, it was still a consultancy. It wasn't a traditional PR firm of, let's get you into the press or let's write speeches or press releases for you. It was consulting at its core. I ran away from that title until I had enough client success and enough success with my own personal brand, which led me to launch Mashman Consulting Group in July of 2024. It's been absolutely wonderful. That's my primary focus on top of my books and public speaking and whatever else I have going on.

Isaac Mashman3:14

I graduated in 2018, but I got my big entrepreneur start in 2017.

Isaac Mashman4:00

Absolutely. Well, in order for me to dive into what Identity Positioning™ is, we have to first define what personal branding is. Now, are you familiar with how that term came about? No. Okay. So in 1997, there was a business management consultant, and he's since retired. He's in his 80s now and he's very difficult to get in contact with. I've tried, but his name is Tom Peters. He wrote an article for Fast Company titled "The Brand Called You." It's about an eight-page article. In it, he [coins] the term personal brand, personal branding. In this article, he talks specifically about executives and job seekers and how they can be in the brand and the business of themselves in order to land higher-paying positions.

If you do some research, apparently during this time it was very competitive in the job market. There was a lot of scarcity going around, so he was using it as a competitive advantage. Well, fast forward from 1997 to 2025, it's become this whole social media fad and everybody labels themselves as a personal branding coach or an expert or an agency or somebody who can help you grow your Instagram page. But I take a philosophical approach to the term and I define personal branding as you. In the second edition of my book, I make the argument that you have had your personal brand from the moment you were born.

It's not just your professional career and your accolades. It's also your personal characteristics, the things that make you you, the fact that, going into the segment, I was like, hey, Nicole, give me one second, I'm grabbing a cup of coffee. That's really a funny and almost half-hearted joke, but it's something about me and my interests that can build rapport with another person. The same way that in your other shows, you start out with a glass of champagne. It builds rapport and it builds connection. Online, we don't want to just talk about what we do and what we can do for another person. We want to build long-lasting relationships.

In order to build long-lasting relationships, think about how you build friendships. You spend time together, you share similar interests, you have similar activities, and I take that personal approach to personal branding. That is where Identity Positioning™ was born. I actually wrote a full-length academic article that I published last year on Figshare, called "Identity Positioning™: A Macroscopic View [of] Personal Branding." In it, I talk about how a lot of times people focus on the right side of the phrase, which is brand, and they don't focus on the personal side. You're a coach who can help business owners scale to $30,000 in 90 days, but you look like everybody else online.

Where is your competitive connection? The competitive connection is your personal identity. That is how you build a long-lasting brand. Think about celebrities like Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson. You don't know him just for the WWE or movies. You know him as a father, you know him for being that big, buff guy, and the way that he sounds. I think there's a massive lesson to be learned there.

Isaac Mashman7:15

Exactly. That's what makes us human. If you can communicate that to the masses, think about how many YouTube channels you might subscribe to on a niche subject. You don't even know the name of the show host. Then another bright, shiny channel comes around and you're like, oh, this one's more entertaining. Without that personal relationship and that personal connection, you're less likely to be loyal and, I would dare say, even have a cult-like relationship with that individual.

Isaac Mashman8:00

Social media has the lowest barrier to entry. You mentioned Substack, and Substack is absolutely free as well. But talking primarily about somebody who wants to grow their personal brand, maybe they want to grow their business, I say that there are three main reasons why you want to grow your personal brand. Number one is money. You want to increase your revenue, whether that's through sponsorships, growing a business, or opportunities to speak on stage. It could be for mission. Some of the greatest public speakers, we look at Les Brown, and Les Brown started with a stutter and he turned that into his power. Then we also have vanity, which is people who primarily just want to build their personal brand just because.

When you take those three questions and those three motivations, you can start asking yourself, okay, what do I want my marketing message to look like? If you could be on social media and you could position yourself, with your marketing message, to have a personal hook, whether you're a mother, an outdoorsman, somebody who loves travel, or a foodie. So you have a personal hook. Then you focus on your marketing message, which is what you do and what you can provide. So my own message is, if you look at it, "addicted to coffee," and then I help emerging and established public figures optimize, position, and scale their personal brands.

Isaac Mashman9:28

I think that's huge. I think, again, you touched on a good point, which is, am I really that interesting? Is this something that I'm even capable of doing? Like, why would somebody want to follow me? But when you realize that you're 10 steps farther down the road than somebody else, I compare where I am today to where I was five years ago or six years ago when I was first starting out. It's like I accomplished a lot of the things that I wanted to accomplish. When you're talking about somebody who might just be starting out, they don't feel like they have the experience. But in my book, I talk about how having no experience is actually an advantage because you're able to take people along for the journey of, hey, I'm just starting out, I don't know everything.

But this is my progress and my journey to becoming that expert and to becoming that person. So I'd say don't let those limiting beliefs hold you back.

Isaac Mashman10:36

Absolutely. Your personal brand is the competitive edge. It's the competitive advantage. If you're able to build this awareness, think about Richard Branson and the Virgin brands and some of the things that he was known for early on. He was that adventurous CEO who would do these big stunts. It developed a lot of publicity for the Virgin brand. We can look at Mark Zuckerberg and Meta. When he started out, he was that nerdy executive, that college student who always showed up in a t-shirt with the curly hair and whatnot. Over the past couple of years, he's made the conscious pivot with his personal brand to start training Jiu-Jitsu and getting into shape and going out on yachts and things like that.

By doing so, his personal brand is connecting people to him and vicariously connecting people to Meta and Facebook and the other businesses that he's representing and running.

Isaac Mashman11:48

Well, social media is the big thing that I would suggest every single person use. Because you can create content, you could record a video, and even if you don't have the best equipment, you eventually will reinvest into your personal brand just like you would a business, and treat your personal brand as if it were a business. So you can go and film a video, and edit that using artificial intelligence in 10 minutes. Next thing you know, you have one piece of content that you can promote, not just on Instagram, but you can post on Facebook, you can post on Threads, and YouTube, and all of these other social media platforms.

So I'm big on organic, and I'm big on taking advantage of the work that you've already put in. So it's like, if you've already created a piece of content, you can promote it as many times as you want. You can always repost it. I would also encourage somebody listening, whether you're [pretty far] into your journey or you're just now creating your first Instagram account, to create a seamless personal brand. So if you were to look at social media and run a Google search of my name, every single platform is at Isaac Mashman. I have the same profile picture. I have the same marketing message. I link my website and I have a pinned image, or a pinned post, which might be phrased a little bit differently because of character limits, but it says and communicates the same aspects of my personal brand.

Having that seamless brand makes it really easy to promote. Once you have that foundation, you start connecting with your friends and family that you already know, and then you can start connecting and adding friend requests to strangers on the internet. That's how my best relationships have been built. Think about our own relationship. It was a post that you made on Threads and I was like, hey, Nicole, let's connect. Now we're having a conversation, [and that was] like an hour ago. I don't think there's anything wrong with that because if you're connecting with somebody for the first time, your personal brand is going to speak for you.

If you've done great things, people are going to get a quick synopsis that you're somebody that is credible or somebody that is worth talking to. Then from there, you could focus on building the relationship. So start with social media and then once you're on social media, create content using a [Skyline] strategy, which is a two to one ratio. So you have two business posts and then you have one personal post. This is the most effective ratio that I've found. So I'll do one post talking about public relations or social media. I'll do another post talking about maybe writing a book or some of the lessons that I learned writing my own or doing a podcast.

Then I'll do a third post which could be me out on a bike adventure, traveling, or [going] out for dinner, and I share a story in these posts. Once you have that foundation laid, then you could focus on credibility at scale, such as press, podcast interviews, starting a podcast, et cetera. There's so many different strategies available.

Isaac Mashman14:44

Well, there's something to be said about consistency, [versus] going and disappearing for three months. It's not like an artist, like a musician who disappears for five years and comes onto the scene with a new album. You're not there yet. So you have to, number one, be consistent with it. This goes back to, if you take that piece of content, even if it's a post that you put on Threads, you can copy that, put it on Facebook, and put it on Twitter as well. Or X. What I have is, on Facebook, sometimes I'll do unique content, and I have it automatically set up to where it also posts on Threads.

So I'm increasing the possibility of visibility, which I know sounds like a little bit of a tongue twister, but the more algorithms you can have working for you [the better]. This doesn't mean you need to spend hours every single day building every single social media platform. But if you build a core audience on one platform, you can promote yourself and your other platforms to that audience and say, hey, I know that we've been connected on Facebook for years. Well, let's connect on Instagram. Why don't you subscribe to my YouTube channel? Why don't you subscribe to my Threads? What that does is it develops omnipresence, and the more you can appear in their feed, the higher you're going to [rank] in the conversations that they're having, and [show up] as that thought leader in their life who can solve problems for them and make their life easier.

So don't focus so much on the [low visibility], because that will scale. I think you can try and post at different times of the day and you can adjust what you're saying and your hooks and all of that. But that is complicated and that stresses people out in the early days. So I wouldn't even focus on that.

Isaac Mashman16:53

Yeah, and that brings up a really unique conversation about people being stingy with their likes, and it doesn't cost anything. I made a post about this, I was like, engagement doesn't cost anything, but it has a huge ROI because people who are getting paid through, like, for example, the Instagram bonuses or the creator funds, that engagement is huge. Again, it doesn't cost anything, but when you're just mindlessly scrolling and you see something that even resonates with you, you sometimes don't click that like button or you don't leave a comment. I think encouraging people to comment and interact with you is something you could be doing. If you're doing a post, say, hey, leave a comment, what are your thoughts? That's something I myself have to improve on.

Isaac Mashman18:25

No, and Nicole, it absolutely makes sense. Me myself, for what I've done over the past couple of years, I have a tendency of brushing over accomplishments and being like, okay, cool. The pursuit is greater than the accomplishment itself, I would say, because you're building yourself into that individual, and by the time the accomplishment comes, you're like, okay, that was awesome. I got the Forbes quote, I got the article published, I did the interview, and I got the speaking engagement. It's like, okay, cool. I think that's something that a lot of high performers or anybody who has any sense of ambition will naturally be faced with.

But an exercise that I recently did to put it into perspective, not in a braggadocious way of, like, look at me, but really from a point of appreciation, is I sat down and over 30 minutes I wrote out a list of everything I've done over the past five years in my career, and the pages kept going, my hand was cramping. By the end of it, I was like, damn, Isaac, give yourself a little bit more credit. You have other people that are coming to you, you're able to help people. You put yourself in the shoes of that young senior kid who didn't know anything, didn't have a strategy.

You never wrote the book. You wanted to write the book. I'm like, oh, wait, give myself a little bit more grace. It's not about giving yourself grace to be an excuse of, like, oh, I reached the pinnacle, I don't have anything else to do. No. But [re-check] what you've done. Lean on that. Even if you need to go back and watch some client testimonials or read some positive reviews, whatever you need to do to boost your confidence. But the other thing, Nicole, is that a lack of action leads to more impostor syndrome coming into your mind. That's something I myself [experience]. The times that I'm not operating, the times that I'm not doing what I know I need to be doing, my confidence is going to drop in light [of that].

So by staying busy and staying in that pursuit of what you're building, you're not going to have time to experience impostor syndrome because you're going to be in motion. It's something that I myself have to really take to heart and even appreciate myself.

Isaac Mashman20:54

I also find comfort in knowing that whatever I want to accomplish, I can reverse engineer the path to get there. I might not have all of the steps, but in my early years, especially in my own training, it's not like there's a formal school of personal branding. It's not like I can go and take a college course. If I did take a college course, it'd be on social media and, like, how to make your LinkedIn profile pop, and I'm like, oh God, how wonderful. No. So I was reverse engineering these public figures and my mentors and seeing what they did and understanding that one of their earlier strategies was doing podcast interviews.

I saw Gary Vaynerchuk had the GaryVee [Audio] Experience, and I launched my own podcast that I used to edit on my lunch period at school. But then from there, I realized that I could leverage podcasting to interview high-caliber guests and grow my own personal brand and continue to pop up on the players of everybody who was following me. I realized that there was a step-by-step process to actually achieving my goals.

Isaac Mashman22:28

Absolutely. Well, number one, it is to make the decision to be a public figure. That will make a lot of people uncomfortable because it's essentially Tupac, ["All Eyez on Me."] It's a great album. But it's not calling yourself a public figure for vanity's sake. It's calling yourself a public figure because that's how opportunities will come to you. The most successful people have big brands, big personal brands, and a lot of influence. You don't want pure fame. You want fame and influence because together, that's where things really start to get good because you have enough visibility. You have enough credibility and public trust to where people are going to come to you to ask you to be on their podcast or to contribute to their book or to work with you as a client.

So I would say number one, you need to make the decision to become a public figure. Number two, ask yourself what you're looking to achieve through your personal brand. Again, money, mission, or vanity. Then number three, that's where you can get into the strategy. That's where I would tell you to start with social media, audit your personal brand, and maybe take a brief calculation of how big your following is. How many people follow you across social media? Do you want to set a follower goal? Then, what have you done in the past that you could leverage for your credibility? Do you have certain degrees? Do you have certifications?

Have you spoken on stage before? I remember working with a client. Her name was [Christina Holling], and she was an author. It wasn't until, like, our third or fourth call in where she was like, yeah, and I spoke on stage at this woman's conference in front of like 500 people. I was like, Christina, this is something you should have told me in the first call. She didn't even realize how much of an impact that has on her personal brand because now she could call herself a public speaker and link to that speech. So make the decision, ask yourself and identify what you're looking to achieve with your personal brand, and then follow through with the actual strategy, which is honestly the easiest part.

If you're afraid of filming content and being in front of the camera, that means that you should probably start filming content and confront that fear. If you hate the sound of your voice, get on a podcast and listen to yourself. Then from there, see what ways you can grow your business. Or, again, this is very broad-based, but you don't have to be a business owner to grow your personal brand. You could be a public speaker, you could be an author, you could just be an influencer, or somebody who wants to save the animals and drive awareness about eco-conscious [causes]. It's like the decision is up to you.

There are so many paths forward and none of them cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. So it doesn't matter where you are in terms of your finances, you can get started today.

Isaac Mashman25:11

Yeah. Well, I think simplicity is the name of the game, because you shouldn't be complicating things. It's like you connect with somebody, you provide value, you pour into them, and that's ultimately how you grow business as well. You provide more value to more people and your revenue will grow.

Isaac Mashman25:34

Yes, in March of this year, I published my second book, which is the second edition of "Personal Branding: A Manifesto on Fame and Influence." This is really a good story that's worth sharing about always being open for more and always seeking areas of improvement, because I published my first edition in 2021. It was 55 pages, shy of 7,000 words. It was really kind of a lead magnet, honestly. I thought it was great at the time, I had that youthful arrogance and I was like, yeah, cool, this is nice. Like, I'm an author. Then I remember reading it and I was like, man, this could be better.

I know I have more to offer. Over the past couple of years, I've been honing in on my skill set and really leaning into being that consultant and developing my methodology, developing Identity Positioning™ and studying more. I wrote the second edition, which is more than 10 times the length. It came out to 376 pages and 65,000 words, 80 sub-chapters. But I talk about not just the philosophy of personal branding. I talk about how personal branding is that concept that might have a new title, you know, from 1997, but it's something that humanity has had since the beginning of intelligent man. Think about Adam and Eve or King David and Goliath.

They all had personal brands, and I make the argument in my book that personal branding is the oldest form of branding. I go from the philosophy of personal branding and I talk about marketing, reputation management, the personal skills that you need to develop, and man, it's something I'm so immensely proud of. I'm grateful to say that it became the number three bestseller in public relations on Amazon. I was only beat by the father of public relations himself, Edward Bernays. So really excited about this and I have some other books I'll be working on. I'm so grateful for it. Even then, talking about impostor syndrome, it's like you write the book and then you brush over it and it's like, no, Isaac, give yourself a little bit more credit.

But really grateful that the book is out there. It's, I believe, the first time that personal branding has been explained and covered as the condition of humanity and intelligent life and something that's so much bigger than social media. Because King David didn't have Twitter, he didn't have Instagram, but he still had a reputation. You have Alexander the Great, Napoleon Bonaparte, and all of these other [figures] that we study. But we're studying them today because of their impact and because of their personal brands.

Isaac Mashman28:19

So I haven't had a podcast in several years. I ended it in June of 2022, but it is more than time for me to launch a new show. So I'm currently working on Executive Status with Isaac Mashman, and the premise behind the show is to merge and show a little bit more of my personality, because I was so rigid for the early years. I wouldn't really showcase my personality and my interests and the humor and maybe some of the dark, self-deprecating humor and all that stuff. So with the show, I want to merge entertainment with business and also talk about personal branding and what it means to be an executive, but not just an executive in a professional sense.

I mean an executive in every area of life. That's where the term Executive Status really stemmed from. It was a conversation I had with my business partner Eric Chow. He's like, yeah, just being an executive, Executive Status, that stands out. And that'll be coming before the end of this year.

Isaac Mashman29:22

Yes. Really easy to find me. You could go to Google and type in my name or you could go to my website, isaacmashman.com. All of my social media handles are at Isaac Mashman. I have to practice what I preach. So having a seamless, omnipresent brand is something I pride myself on.

Isaac Mashman29:41

So one of the lessons I learned from the first edition to the second edition is the importance of distribution. Whether you're a podcaster or an author, finding channels that can broaden the distribution of your work is huge. Don't just be on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, be on iHeartRadio and Pandora and everywhere else that you can. But you can purchase my book on Amazon, it's in paperback and hardback. You can get it on Books-A-Million, you can go into your local Barnes & Noble and even order it. That's how aggressive I took this.

Isaac Mashman30:14

Yes, ma'am. There are so many people who don't, and I have to make sure I do.

Isaac Mashman30:41

Absolutely, Nicole. Glad that we could do this.