Unleashing Personal Brands and Entrepreneurial Journeys

Isaac Mashman0:17

Yeah, Joseph. Well, we have been wanting to do this interview, this conversation, for probably two years now, and our schedules just kept getting conflicted. So I'm glad to actually be able to sit down and have a conversation with you today. I'm originally from Jacksonville, Florida.

Isaac Mashman0:38

I specialize in helping public figures optimize and scale their personal brands. Around 2020, at the beginning of the pandemic, after I had been in the music industry for about a year on and off (this was pre-COVID, when it was, well, is this going to kill everybody or is this just a common cold kind of thing?), the artist that I was managing at the time, while I was doing this record label, decided to basically get out of the music industry after COVID started, because we were hosting a concert. I was going to fly out to Fort Wayne, Indiana. I was in California at the time, and we decided to call that off.

At that moment, I came to the realization that in the music industry, the only way that you can really make money is at scale. You have to reach hundreds of thousands and millions of people and get millions of streams to really make a solid business. Then I [didn't want to] focus on 360 deals and just deals that I personally wouldn't take. I think that this is something that if it's not a deal that you would take, you shouldn't offer it. So I decided to launch my public relations firm, Mashman Ventures, which is what I'd been building for the past four years, but it created more questions than answers.

So in 2024, a couple months ago, I dissolved my firm officially, in public, and then decided to launch a consulting firm. So I work with public figures, optimizing and scaling their personal brands, whether that be improving the distribution of their IP, their intellectual property, courses, podcasts, books, improving their social media, optimizing it. Just small, simple things, tactics, and tips that are extremely important for visibility and for credibility. That's a really quick summary that avoids me going into all of the small details of my childhood.

Isaac Mashman3:24

Excellent question. I love that. The podcasts I've been getting on lately, Joe, have all been so tactical and so specific. I'm absolutely adoring all of the hosts that are inviting me on because we're able to talk about this. If I could go back really quick, I actually had more than three businesses. MCG, which is Mashman Consulting Group for short, is my seventh or eighth endeavor. That's kind of crazy to think about, because in high school, I was doing a clothing line, then got into network marketing. I was in three different companies, four different times. Phenomenal experience, I recommend it. But then from there, I wanted to post products on my website and do some weird drop shipping thing that I didn't really do much with.

Then from there, that's when I got into the record label, and I also delved into traditional media services like podcast management. Then I realized that I hated the done-for-you kind of service. I'd much rather do it with you and enable you, or delegate (that's my gift), than actually sit down and manage it, whereas I could have a virtual assistant or anybody that I train do that task. So Mashman Consulting Group is ultimately the culmination of seeking clarity, and [the reason I say] seeking clarity [is that with] every business, it wasn't that I was pivoting. The pivot between, I mean, Mashman Ventures and Mashman Consulting Group was actually more of a lateral pivot than a change of niches, because I went from, this is a public relations firm offering consulting services, to, this is a consulting firm offering consulting services.

So I was effectively just changing the brand, changing the name, and taking the very best of our approach. I think that that's important to distinguish because people think they have to start over, and this leads into the next question: people have this misunderstanding about personal branding. They believe that anytime they create a new social media account or a new website, they're creating a new personal brand, when you have actually been building the same personal brand from the moment you were born. This is a huge philosophical difference between me and the next guy, and my training, because most people would take that practical [approach]: this is the media vehicle, so you have a new personal brand.

But every single time I changed and pivoted, people still followed me for me. That's the thing. You have to position yourself as a public figure if you want to land more deals. Now, how does this work? It's pretty simple. You position yourself as a public figure. You get into more places where other people can edify you, i.e. podcast interviews, because this is a form of edification, whether or not a podcast host wants to admit it. You're edifying your guests, unless the guest looks like a complete fool, which hopefully I don't. Then from there, you get more people, you build your personal brand, you build your credibility, and you are that public figure that can be trusted. It lowers the action threshold it takes for somebody to work with you in comparison to having to fight for every single deal.

Isaac Mashman7:41

Well, if you only post about business, you lose the personal part. If you only focus and post about your personal life, you lose the credibility and the professional side of things. So if I'm going to want to find the best neurosurgeon, and all they do is post about their family and post about trips and such, there's nothing that tells me they know what they're doing in terms of neurosurgery. That might be a radical example because obviously you have certifications. But in a sales example, if you're in sales, and the only thing you talk about is your life and your family and that you went to Firehouse Subs for lunch, well, cool.

I might be able to relate with you on the fact that I too like Firehouse Subs and I like [Cousins Subs]. But that's not going to be enough for me to actually decide to work with you and trust you and put my faith in you and hire you. So Joe, if we were to take the phrase personal brand and break it down the middle, you have personal on the left side, which is who you are, every single interest, every single aspect of your story. Then you have the brand side, which is your career, your profession, the way you make money. Whenever you're building yourself online, you need to do, for every two business posts, one personal post.

That is the best ratio I've come up with to date of what people need to adopt. So if I'm doing a post about a trip that I'm going on, I could do another post that is now about business or about personal branding. I'm never going to tell somebody to micro-niche down. I think niching and micro-niching are so different, because you, being a salesperson, you are a sales trainer. You are not somebody [who says], I only work with doctors' offices to improve their sales. That is an example of micro-niching down. It limits your market, and you're creating more competition because you're [competing] with all the doctors' offices in your area to fight for each other's clients and prospects.

So if you were to say, no, I work with X, Y, and Z, or let's say white collar businesses, to increase their sales, so now you work with dentists, doctors, and lawyers, now you are niche, but not micro niche. But then you can have the public appeal by saying, hey, I work with these people, but these are some tactics that apply way outside of just white collar business that you can use to improve your sales. So now you have a wider appeal, and there's this very tightrope that you have to walk between being that subject matter expert and only being an expert in such a small [niche] area.

I'm usually against that. I'd rather cast the net and maybe pick through it than be the person who only casts the line and hopes they get something, even if the fish is bigger, for example. Yeah, yeah, no, no, because in the beginning I was.

Isaac Mashman16:10

That's at least my thought on it. Yeah, and I 100% agree. I think that not being afraid [is important] because we're in a strange era where it's easy to say something online behind a keyboard and not have any repercussions.

Isaac Mashman17:08

If you think about certain clients and you say, you need to do this, and they don't do it, their results will suffer and they will possibly blame you. So it is up to you to go up to them and say, no, you need to do this. I told you when we started that there would be expectations for both parties. I'm thinking about even some consultations I've done recently that I need to follow up on today, because they have not executed everything that I told them to do and that they said they would do. So you have to take a stance there and be principled even in your delivery.

By building yourself as a public figure and positioning yourself, Joe, you're increasing the expectation. So you're lowering the action threshold, but you're increasing the expectation of what they are thinking they'll receive. The receivables, the deliverables. A little bit about a high-caliber subject. But I mean, if you have a thousand positive reviews or you have one positive review, the expectations are widely different. I think it comes back down to principle. I did.

Isaac Mashman19:18

That's one of the biggest pieces of advice I think a host has ever delivered on a show that I've been on. I need people to go and rewind that, and as a guest I'm saying that you need to rewind this. Normally it's the other way around when people are doing interviews, but that literally is the secret to lowering your stress. Because there have been multiple moments, especially launching something new, you have a lot of stuff to do. You have a lot of expenses coming out. It doesn't matter if you're making $100 million or $1 million or $100. There are still expenses and things that you need to pay for.

It's all relative. Having one deal, I was thinking about this earlier, I have a couple of deals in particular that I would really love to close with high quality people. But if I had somebody approach me today and say, hey, can you work with me, and it was somebody that I didn't agree with, like if an Italian mobster said, I could pay you 50 grand to work with me, I'm thinking that 50 grand would be nice. [But that doesn't] mean that I should get in bed with the mafia. Right. But if you have that constant flow and those conversations, and this goes back to [how] as entrepreneurs, it's easy to treat this like a hobby.

It's like, you need to actually have that influx and that discipline to say, no, I need to be making 10 contacts every day or I need to have multiple deals that are fluctuating, so I can get to scale, especially if you don't have a team built. So for myself, as an example, as I scale MCG over the next decade, we'll have 500 consultants that are able to do deals by themselves and the company will naturally float profit based off a commission structure. But until I have those consultants built, I'm relying on myself and then the COO and several other people to start sending referrals and start driving business.

So it's like, being willing to talk about these things is what would really help people, because these are the aspects that I wish I knew when I started, that nobody had the guts to talk about, because they wanted to talk about fluff, guru, go ahead and feel motivated. But no, you need an influx of prospects and conversations to keep the money flowing. Then from there, you can reach those levels because if one deal falls through, you have five more to take its place.

Isaac Mashman22:11

Yeah, and then I would also love to talk about maybe the confidence between a sales person and the deliverables too, because you have to believe in the product you're selling. What I did a couple years ago in network marketing, part of the reason why I got out of the industry was not only about [wanting] more control, but it was that I never truly 100 percent believed in any of the products. Knowing that I didn't have that belief, how could I put my best foot forward? So I'm thinking about recently, I made a post last week, which I posted everywhere, because whenever you're making a social media post, you should be diversifying where you're putting it.

So you have multiple algorithms, for better or for worse, promoting it. Again, the reason I say for better or for worse is that on Threads, [for example,] you haven't spent much time developing an audience. There is not an audience per se, but a culture. Because the audience you build determines the culture that is kind of established around your brand. I did this post about, like, I've been featured in Forbes. I've been featured in Entrepreneur. I've been flown out. I've done these things. I think it's time to start flaunting a little bit and showcasing that you can go from a nobody to somebody. Because it's not like I came out with this skyscraper view my first day in business. It's not what it took.

Isaac Mashman23:32

The other side of me that I cannot ignore is, what am I delivering? I went through and I'm like, okay, improving the distribution of IP, improving social media, launching a book, getting on the speaker circuit. All of these different things are things that people pay for and pay good money for. I cannot let somebody on the internet say that, oh, all of those things are fluff, and I'm convincing people to spend their money with me. No, they're deliverables. I have faith in those deliverables and I can see results that are verified. So having that confidence in what you're selling and what you're doing, I think it's quintessential. The same thing with building your personal brand, having the faith and the confidence in yourself.

Isaac Mashman25:55

I never thought in my lifetime, as a kid seeing the Forbes magazine on the stand in Publix, that I'd be an adult and I'd be quoted on the website, but then I would not care that I was quoted on the website, because other people have ruined that credibility. Because there have been moments like, me getting into the public relations space, I didn't leave it because of the negative labels, but I did leave it because I felt like there was a better way forward. However, if I would have stayed in the public relations space and continued building Mashman Ventures, or I could have kept the business and pivoted and rebranded it, I didn't want to go through all that.

But if I did, I would have still had to fight the negative connotation of these gurus that are paying for press or paying for podcasting. A lot of podcasts have appearance fees now. Like there's several big name entrepreneurial shows that charge $3,500 plus for an appearance fee. That in and of itself, if you were legitimate, the podcast should be paying you, especially if you are this public speaker that's supposed to be getting paid $10,000 to $25,000 for an appearance. If you're paying to go on a show, you're effectively lying to yourself and lying to whoever's paying you for that 10 grand to come out. It's quite ridiculous to think about.

The instant gratification in sales is a lot like this. It's like, you get Napoleon Hill in The Law of Success, the book that was the precursor to Think and Grow Rich. He has an entire chapter on debt and saving. He says that a lot of times you'll make the money.

Isaac Mashman27:25

It's like those habits are [hard to break]. I feel like this is a conversation on so many different avenues, but they're all things that need to be talked about because they're not sexy. Like it's not sexy to think, oh, let me put my money into a different fund or let me put my money elsewhere or let me not spend every dollar I make. That takes discipline.

Isaac Mashman30:00

Well, I don't know if going from Florida to Little Rock is necessarily the successful flex that you probably thought in your mind. Don't get me wrong. I love Little Rock. This is now my home, [where] I'm working again. Little Rock has a negative connotation with it too, with the crime. Like top 10 most dangerous city, but you don't see on the news this beautiful view. You don't see the beautiful river, the Arkansas River, running through it, or this historical church and chapel that I'm looking at through my window, or the airport. Like, you don't see those things on the news, because again, happiness doesn't sell.

You know, it's sadness, it's sex, it's things that are divisive, it's ideas, emotions. I mean, what's the percentage, 80% of sales is emotion-based, and again you have to have principle so you don't sell somebody something they don't need. Now, in terms of my definition of success, I haven't even tried thinking about coming up with my own definition. Asking, like, my why is, why not? Why wouldn't I? My purpose is to live up to my potential in all areas of life. It's not some buttercup, I want to do this to change the world kind of answer. That's not what motivates me. That's not how I'm wired.

Isaac Mashman31:28

The idea of having consultants that are extremely successful and making money and putting food on their table, that also motivates me. But I'm motivated by that close connection, not by this external savior complex. I tried to at one point, and I realized that that just didn't get me anywhere close mentally to where I wanted to be. Now Earl Nightingale has the best definition of success I've ever heard, which is, success is the progressive realization of a worthy ideal. In his audio, The Strangest Secret, which I believe everybody should go listen to, it's on YouTube, it's on SoundCloud, you should download it. You should buy a vinyl off of eBay.

I have multiple vinyls of this audio recording because of how good it is. It's about 35 minutes. I've listened to it dozens and dozens, if not hundreds, of times at this moment. He says that a school teacher who wants to be a teacher is a success. The millionaire who is a millionaire because he wants to be is a success. I think that in my own life, in my own terminology, when I was younger, one of the mistakes I made was thinking that because somebody wasn't wanting to be rich or somebody wasn't wanting to be famous, they were not a success. That was coming from an arrogant standpoint as this young entrepreneur.

I do not view them as a success, but if they view themselves as a success then I will respect that. I would not like to change places with them, but I will respect that they're happy and content with what they are doing, and we need more of that. But in my own life, my driving success, a decade from now, is going to be, instead of being in the skyscraper as a tenant, owning the skyscraper. Instead of being the person who is local here, I will have multiple properties. I'll have multiple houses. I'll be able to have the mansion on the St. Johns in Jacksonville, the mansion on the Arkansas River in Little Rock, and the skyscraper [penthouse] in Miami.

Like there are so many levels and facets of it. I have no issue admitting those things and saying those things again. That goes down to when you're building out your personal brand, not being afraid of speaking about what you actually want, because that's what you'll get more of.

Isaac Mashman34:49

Ask me in a couple of years from now, frankly, because that's one of those things where I don't think that balance is necessary. I don't think balance exists. I think it can in a perfect world, but we're not in a perfect world. I think that there should be a degree of appreciation in building from a positive energy, but I've always seen more success and more growth spurts in those moments where I have an enemy. That has been [true], and if you think about Henry Ford building the car, right, and building the first engine, it wasn't a matter of, I want to build like the greatest automobile kind of thing.

It was, I have an enemy, and that enemy is transportation. There's no way to go from point A to point B, there's a better way of doing this. There is an enemy which creates the drive for a solution. All of these inventions and engineering problems and things are ultimately this pursuit for a way better. Having that dark energy as a pursuit, to where now somebody doesn't say that thing anymore.

Isaac Mashman43:35

Well, the economy is the same way. Everything in life is cycles. You have winter, spring, summer, fall. Well, it's like you have that, you're saying that it goes in 24 hours. It goes in 365 days. The planets have their own rotational cycles. Everything is a cycle here. Life and death, childhood. I think that women, especially, and this is why I believe we need more public figures. We need more people who can step up and talk, because right now we have the same talking head entrepreneurs, the same talking head politicians, the same talking head people. Once you get past that and you start, no, I'm a real person who has done something real, [and I clawed] my way up, it's just going to be another cycle, because down the road, you're going to eventually be in the place where we're viewing these people now. So it's like you might not be Tony Robbins today, but a decade from now, you could be the next Tony Robbins.

Isaac Mashman44:51

We need that new cycle of people, and maybe, just maybe, Joe, we can get to a level and a degree of consistency with quality leaders and quality public figures that can start progressing it forward.

Isaac Mashman45:53

My businesses are named after me because I want my kid, my son, to take up the family business. That is where I think we need to go back to.

Isaac Mashman47:27

It's the same thing with personal branding, because when I'm talking to a client, I'm asking them why are they building their personal brand? Why is that something you want to do? At any moment that I don't ask these questions, or the times that I don't get the close, it's because I'm not putting the client's needs first. Coming from that place of let me sell you versus let me help you is important. That's a lesson that I've learned over the past year. A person will build their personal brand to make money, for vanity, or to drive awareness to a cause. Those are the three major driving forces, because when you think about building your personal brand and positioning yourself, you're going to want to help grow your business and use that as an organic tool to drive people towards whatever you're associated with.

Just like if I need a sales trainer, I'm automatically going to choose whatever company you're working with because of you. That right there is an example of a successful personal brand and that degree of human connection, because who do people do business with? This isn't new. People who they like, know, and trust. Exactly. I know every single person, when I stop talking, had that in their brain, but that cliche has power, and that is effectively why you build your personal brand, so everybody knows, likes, and trusts you. Or if they don't like you per se, they still know and trust you. Because I can trust somebody and not like them.

It's true. Having that control and having that connection and community and people that know you, you now have leverage, and that leverage can be directed, or, from a vanity standpoint, entertainers usually become famous because they want to, because it's vain. I'm not here to dispute, is that good or is that bad or is that contributing to the downfall of man. I'm not here for that conversation. Then also to drive awareness to a cause. It's like once you understand those things, you can start taking action steps, reverse engineering where it is you want to be, whether by revenue, follower count, network, or awareness, and taking the steps to get there.

So if you need to make, for example, a hundred podcast interviews in a year, well, I know that I should have done, at the beginning of the year, eight podcast interviews per month in order to hit that goal. Then, two more months [in], I have 10. I fell behind launching MCG. So now I know that, oh no, July, I need to do 20 interviews and I need to do 15 every month moving forward. But again, reverse engineering and then putting the action plan in place, just like if you want to get a hundred followers, you send out a hundred messages and you build a hundred relationships. Like that's how you build the foundation that you can start getting.

Isaac Mashman50:20

I think the easiest thing is to go to Google and search up Isaac Mashman and you'll be able to find my website, be able to find all of my social media handles. It's at Isaac Mashman across the board. That would be a really good starting point to kind of see maybe where you need to be a couple of years from now, and there's a point that I'm working toward too. So this is not the end all be all, but five years ago I had none of this. I believe that more people really need to lean in and understand that no, it is in fact possible.

This isn't some fairy tale, but there is a pursuit of happiness kind of thing. You can go from having nothing to building it up, and from having no strong, established personal brand to being well known. So run a quick Google search, follow me on the platform of your choice, or follow me on all of them for that matter. Love to connect with everyone.

Isaac Mashman51:21

[Oh], man, I've been asked this four times in the past four days. I've been stumped every single time. This is like the greatest question that people can ask, one that [stumps] any guest, but one thing that I would say is that, man, I'm thinking about how I could tie this in directly when it comes to sales: it is a gift to be in a position where somebody trusts you enough, where you do not necessarily even know who they are, but they automatically.

Isaac Mashman51:56

It is something that should be treated as such, even though that action threshold might be lowered, that they would automatically throw money at you. Like I would throw money at Joe. [He] would probably throw money at me if he needs help. That is a privilege that you should not ever take advantage of. Take advantage of it in the sense of appreciating it, but not take advantage of the person. So that is what I would say. So if you land those features, if you do those interviews, if you build those relationships, if you are that public figure, appreciate that privilege and treat it as such, just like I would never cut down a red oak tree or a redwood tree.

I would never cut one down because I appreciate how long it's been there. But at the same time, somebody could come in with a chainsaw and cut it down in an hour.