Building Your Personal Brand with Isaac Mashman

Isaac Mashman0:47

Do the backstroke. But yeah, man, super excited to have this book out. It's called Personal Branding: A Manifesto on Fame and Influence. You're actually the second podcast that I've talked to since the book was released, or right around the same period, and the second Justin too within the past month, which is kind of [funny]. All right, go Justin. Let's go. But yeah, I launched on November 1st, and the premise of the book is, I like to call it a work. I don't really want to call it a book per se because it covers so many different avenues, and I've been reflecting over the past couple of days.

I'm like, I don't even know quite what I wrote, because it covers the power of personal branding, but it also covers some strategies and the basics of personal branding. It really is something that if you were to give it to your grandmother or your grandfather or your parents, and they don't have an understanding of personal branding, they would understand just what it is and how powerful it is. A lot of the people I talk to with my business, they don't understand just how powerful and how much potential their own personal brand has. That's something that I've really embraced. So today I woke up and saw that it was number one in new releases in the public relations category, which I'm like, yes, which is something I don't think I ever hit before.

So now when you go to the Amazon page, it has the little orange banner. I'm like, yeah, that's good on you, baby. Like, orange looks good. So yeah, man, I'm on a really, really high frequency right now. It peaked, up to today, at number 14 in the overall best sellers category, public relations, but I'm waiting to hit number one for that. So I can say number one best seller in the public relations category. I've got to make that distinguishing factor though, because I don't want to be one of those guys. It's like, I have the number one Amazon bestseller. I'm like, no, you have the best seller in Fiji history.

Like I want to make sure that I'm clarifying. It's in the category. But when you're running a public relations firm, I think public relations is a great [category].

Isaac Mashman3:13

Yeah, yeah. That's a good way to sum it up. I do need to note that with traditional PR firms, it's really about closing the gap between the consumer and the corporation. We don't focus on corporations, we focus on individuals. Now, working with high-level executives is something that we'll be doing in 2022. But what we specialize in is building out your personal brand organically, in the right way, because there is a wrong way and a right way. A lot of people today, they fake it till they make it, they buy their followers, buy the Yahoo Finance feature. I think that that treads the thin line, it blurs the line of ethics.

So it's like, I don't know. But then they try to say that, hey, we're this person, and in reality you're really not. You were only featured in Fox 34 out of El Marva, Nebraska, like, you weren't featured on Fox News. So those are some things that I see. I'm not trying to hate on anybody. But I want to make sure that ethics and morals are really at the center of what we're doing and our work with our clients, because it's your reputation. If you're in reputation and you're selling yourself, it's not going to come as a surprise when it gets ruined a couple years down the road, when somebody on Reddit's like, hey, this person's [a fraud].

Isaac Mashman5:07

So it is not the only way by any means, and it is not the thing that created personal branding. That's actually a point that I bring up in the manifesto. Personal branding's been around forever. Since before civilization began, I talk about chieftains. You have these different tribal barbarians or people who are traveling in groups. Certain chieftains were feared more than others. They're like, this is the person that you don't want to mess with because he's going to kill you, steal your crops, burn your place to the ground, and you won't have a tent to sleep in. So that chieftain had a personal brand. Then throughout the years, you had the pharaohs, you had the European kings who led their nation to maintain power with divine right.

Now because of social media, it's becoming a buzzword that everybody's throwing around, but they think that social media created it. Now an earlier mention was in Napoleon Hill's 1930 work, Think and Grow Rich, where he talks about organized planning and putting together a portfolio, like a really, I guess you could call it a resume of sorts, but it was more of a portfolio. That was an early example of personal branding, but social media is just expediting the entire understanding of it. Yeah.

Isaac Mashman6:32

Far too many actually. Far too many. One of the things about that though, I think one of the reasons why I got involved with this business is I had a conversation with somebody a couple of years ago before I even launched my firm.

Isaac Mashman7:07

That kind of impressed upon me. I'm like, wow, there are a lot of people out here making a lot of money. I'm talking tens of thousands of dollars every month, riding off of this horrible practice of giving this false persona. This is legitimately faking it till you make it, acting like you're a celebrity. Just because you took a picture with Ice Cube or took a picture with somebody, it doesn't mean you're in the same friend group as them.

Isaac Mashman8:28

Then I got involved with the industry of network marketing when I was still in high school. When I got involved with the industry, I started seeing the potential of making money. I started listening to Gary V, and although I don't agree with much of what Gary V says today, like I don't agree with like 70% of his stuff, really, he's the first person I gravitated to. He has a wildly successful personal brand. I don't have to agree with him to respect him. Because of that, I really started to understand it. I was known as that helpful kid in church. I was in Boy Scouts. I was the senior patrol leader for a couple of terms, and there's so many different aspects of it to where I eventually embraced it, because I was like, you know what?

Rather than being the anti-social butterfly I used to be that ran away from pictures on picture day, why don't I gravitate towards that and look for that? Why don't I seek it out and do something? There's so many benefits to it. Nothing about my story makes sense as to why I would have wound up doing what I'm doing. But I started to love it, and now I'm talking 90 miles an hour about a subject. I think that's a good indicator that you enjoy it.

Isaac Mashman10:13

Right. Yes. But it's also deeper than that because then that treads the line of, oh, this guy's making a million dollars selling courses, all you have to do is buy my course. I want to make sure that there's a firm distinction between that guy and what I'm doing, because although I am working with people to build out their personal brands, as I'm building out my own, obviously I'm going to be building my personal brand. But that's when you have the conversation of your personal brand isn't just based around what you do. It's also based around who you are. A lot of the people that I've been fortunate enough to say have bought my manifesto over the past week and a half, two weeks since it was launched have been people that followed me before I got involved with network marketing, and before I got involved with my public relations firm today that I launched in 2020.

They were the ones that were watching my story when I was that ambitious young kid in network marketing or having my first ever podcast. Like they were the people who followed the journey and continued to support me, because your personal brand isn't what you do, it's who you are. That's a big factor. So I'm creating content based around my life, based around my personality, the unique things that help develop rapport with an audience and with people.

Isaac Mashman12:21

Okay, so you can, and I've talked to various people about this before, you can build out your personal brand in the right networks. You have your personal brand with your friends and your family and your church group or whatever you're a part of. You're going to have your civic clubs, maybe Rotary, but you can also take it a step further and build out your personal brand to the general public and people that might not be able to buy from you initially. You can build out your personal brand by building a successful company, or you can build out your personal brand as you're building your company.

They go hand in hand. Numbers do have a great impact. But [it goes] deeper than the numbers. I know a couple years ago, there was a story how this influencer literally had 2 million, 3 million followers. She started selling t-shirts and only got like 10 orders or something like that. I'm like, wow. Because people didn't trust her or people didn't really associate and relate to her. It's like you might be following her for the sex appeal, but not for the person appeal. What is appealing about you for being you? That's the deeper aspect of this. You have to have this level of trust. You have to build it up.

You have to take them from being a follower to a fan, to an acquaintance, to a friend, or to somebody that, although you might have never met them, they feel like they know you. That is the thing that is going to make you stand out and really be the distinguishing factor when [people] compare you versus the next guy.

Isaac Mashman14:30

Well, number one, Justin, I want to make it clear that you are building out your personal brand regardless of whether you want to or not. It's something that you've had since the beginning of time, since you've been born. Your parents created your brand. They determined your name, where you were born, what hospital you were born in, or if you were born at home with a bedside nurse, they determined your religion, your political affiliation, where you went to school, everything about your early years. They had a huge factor in your personal brand, but even then, as a baby or as a young elementary-age student, your teacher started to know you for certain things.

The class clown. Why do you think students in their yearbook are given the titles of class clown or best dressed or most likely to succeed? All these different titles because of their personal brand. Yeah. So today, it's about making the conscious decision to build out your personal brand, understanding that, hey, I have this, I'm going to have it till the day I die, but do I want to direct it? Do I want to continue creating it and be in control of it? Or do I want to just drift through life, as Napoleon Hill says, and let whatever happens happen? That's a horrible place to be in because that means that you don't have the control.

You gave your control away to the next person. So if you were somebody who wants to say, I'm going to position myself as a person of authority, position myself as a public figure, as somebody of interest, then you need to actually be having conversations with people. I always say that if you're not able to have a conversation about yourself, then how do you expect other people to market you as well? You're not going to be doing the heavy lifting after it starts getting into momentum. Other people are. A big aspect, and I'll give away the secret sauce right here, I don't know if you're going to have this on video, but you know, this is an author copy of the book, but one of the reasons why I wanted to write this is not so much for a lead magnet.

Yeah, it's going to help me get business. It actually, I had a prospect call today with somebody who saw somebody who shared the book, but it's going to be in their homes. It's going to be something that you can hold physically and flip through the pages and get a glimpse into my mind, which means that I could leave this in a Barnes & Noble. I could go to a hotel room. I saw somebody, Mike Vikara, he just published his own book called, like, Socks on a Rooster. Every single time he goes to a hotel room, he leaves behind a book. I'm like, I'm stealing that page out of your playbook, my man, like, I'm going to take that.

But the fact is, you have to be willing to have conversations with everybody. Even if that's in the mall, getting coffee out of Starbucks, ask what they're interested in. Get more information about them. Share your social medias with them. There are so many different avenues of marketing. To tell you a story, and then I'll be quiet, there is a time, and I mentioned this in the manifesto, I had business cards, and I was in LA, and it was a place called The Grove. We went into a Barnes & Noble, I was with a friend at the time, and I dropped off business cards in almost every single book that I thought would be of interest in the business section.

I'm talking, I dropped it off in Gary V's book, in The 10X Rule by Grant Cardone. Like I was putting into all the big players, I'm like, bam, bam, bam, bam. Then I got a message like a week and a half later from somebody who bought one of the books, and he's like, found your card. No, it didn't result in business, but now that guy knows who I am in a sense, he's like, oh, he's going to hear Isaac Mashman in the future and think about, oh, I picked up his book in the Barnes and Noble.

Isaac Mashman18:17

Yes, and your content is a way to bridge that gap. The content you create, even if that's something personal, like, yesterday I took a video of me going on a walk. Those are just examples of things. Oh, now that person's going to be like, wow, he lives somewhere where the trees turn different colors during the fall. Then it might not seem big for somebody who's raised up north, where they have all four seasons, but somebody who's in Florida who only sees green year round, like myself, is going to be like, wow, that's gorgeous. Like, I've never been in a place where they have actual fall leaves, like that's different. Yeah. That's truthful. That's truthful. But those are different things that are able to bridge that gap of connectivity.

Isaac Mashman19:59

Well, great question. Number one, I think self-awareness is one of these buzzwords too. It's not something that can be taught per se. It's something that has to be developed with time. Many people live their life and they don't know why they're alive. Earl Nightingale talked about this in The Strangest Secret. If you took a hundred men and you broke it down, one is going to become massively successful, four or five are going to become wealthy, and then you're going to have 60 plus out of the hundred who are just broke. Like they started out with the ambition and then they went down the drain. That's factual because there's a reason why there's a 1%.

There's a reason why people are more successful, because they make the conscious decision. See, it's a matter of consciousness. It's a matter of not so much self-awareness, but understanding that you don't know something. Right? Stages of learning, and I'm not going to go through all of them, but one of them is unconscious incompetence. You don't know that you don't know. That's where most people are at. Then there's conscious incompetence, where you know that you don't know something, and then you can start taking those action steps to become better, to become more educated. Somebody on Facebook brought up the Dunning-Kruger effect, and that sent me down this realm of study about the Dunning-Kruger effect.

Most people, the average person, think that they're better than they actually are, because they don't know any better. I think that that's why education is important, and self-education. I say that at the center of all achievement is personal growth. I stand by that until the day I die. Oh yeah, yeah. It's true, man. I've [saved] so many years off of my life just by study.

Isaac Mashman22:53

That is a fantastic question. It's something that I've been reflecting on, and I had a conversation with a friend of mine the other day about this. Right now we have this disassociation with reality. I myself experience this when my business is 99% built online. I'm like, man, you go and have a face-to-face interaction with somebody and something, like, whoa, I don't remember this since high school. I'm like, whoa. I'm like, weird, it's different. I'll be honest, I can feel disassociated at times. That can be problematic, because now every single time you go back out, you have to re-associate yourself with reality. Now, we're entering this time where Facebook's holding company rebranded to Meta, which means that they're focusing on the metaverse.

I personally love it. However, there are negative things that are going to come about from that, because we're going to be living in a Ready Player One world. It's going to be, that's a good way to have people that are sitting in the corner. I saw a meme the other day. It's like, what they want you to think it is, what it actually is, and it's somebody in the corner in a dark room with an Oculus headset on. I think that that'll be a reality for certain people, but personal branding is going to expand into avatars. We already have gamers like Ninja who have in-game avatars on Fortnite, like all these different games.

It's like we've already been living in this world, now it's a matter of total world immersion. But then we're going to have the conversation of building out your avatar's brand online, your personal brand in the metaverse, and developing clout, because the other thing is there are going to be microtransactions in the metaverse. I don't want to get too geeked out here. Yeah, you can't be. Sorry. There are going to be microtransactions saying you can't unlock this or you can unlock this. Or I could imagine virtual meet and greets. Imagine Ariana Grande's avatar and you pay $100 to do a virtual meet and greet with her.

She's there real time. She's just talking. Yeah. So there are a bunch of different implications, but it is important to understand that the things that are going to make you the most money over time are going to be in the real world. Be able to buy a plot of land or buy real estate or buy things, because, yeah, you can live in the metaverse, but you're still going to be existing in real life, eating food and living somewhere. I think that's going to result in an exchange of wealth. I could see more and more people going broke because of this total world immersion. Meanwhile, you have the select few who are completely making all the money. There are so many different possibilities here and it's going to be exciting but concerning.

Isaac Mashman26:58

Yeah, go ahead. Number one is increase your rates. Every single time I've ever talked to somebody, they want to charge too little. The lead personal trainer on the Mashman Ventures team, [Logan], I brought on a personal trainer to be able to provide those services to our clients, not to our clients so much, but to our team members. Like Eric Chow, he's the chief consultant. He's been training with Logan for 20 weeks, 20 weeks. I'm like, oh my gosh. Like I'm like, wow, this is why I brought somebody on. I brought on a lead mental health advisor, Steve Thorpe. But when it comes to the personal training space and the fitness space, it's important to stand out by building out your personal brand and actually take it to where you're like, hey, I am a celebrity personal trainer or I am the personal trainer.

But then on top of that, making sure that you're still doing interviews or getting into articles and sharing those personal aspects of your life more, and when you're in a space that is so centered around looks and superficial things, you can lose touch with the actual person that has those six-pack abs. You can lose touch with the person who has the sex appeal. That's important to make sure that you're aware of. Self-awareness to where it's like, no, but this is something about me that you might not know. I'm a coffee drinker, I'm a huge nerd, I like X, Y, and Z things. Then by connecting with those people, you're going to be able to charge more too, because people are going to want to work with you, not just for your results, but because of who you are.

Isaac Mashman28:45

Then we went off for a cup of coffee and it's like, whoa, like, yeah.

Isaac Mashman29:05

I'm from Jacksonville, Florida. I'm living in Little Rock, Arkansas.

Isaac Mashman29:22

What's next, man? That is a huge question. Number one, I know that, you know, I wasn't even planning on announcing this, but I am going to be doing a hardback version. It's still going to be the same length, but it's going to have extra margins to take notes. [And] I'm going to be doing a workbook for clients, and every single client that works with the firm is actually getting a copy of this as well, hard copy, to make sure that they're understanding the power that their personal brand has. With the prospect call I had today, he didn't quite understand why it was so important. He didn't quite grasp the idea.

That's why this [is] so important, because it uses old and new world examples without naming anybody, to where you automatically know who that person was just by me mentioning some of the traits and some of the things that they did, some of the actions, some of the accolades, or some of the horrible things actually.

Isaac Mashman30:09

I'm going to be targeting five to $10 million companies and working with executives, and my own podcast, Chase the Vision, that I'm working on, expanding the team, training up more consultants, taking this to $100 million by 2030. I got some very, very ambitious goals for the next 12 months or 13, 14 months. A lot of them include the personal brand and a lot of them are also financial, in terms of I'm trying to buy a property. I already published a book before the age of 22, and within four years of graduating high school, I've already published a book. So I've kind of measured, and I know that this might not be the best thing, but I don't think vanity metrics are always bad, but I've measured out.

I'm like, all right, [compared to] everyone I've graduated with, I think I'm doing all right. I'll just be honest, and I've measured it based off of that because I'm like, that means I'm doing something and I'm on track. So if I keep up with this record, by the time I'm 30, I'm going to be able to do what I want and fly private everywhere. So measuring these things is kind of keeping me motivated, because my purpose isn't some, like, I'm trying to heal the world, because a lot of people say they want to heal the world. That's their purpose, but it really isn't, because the only reason they're saying they want to heal the world is to make themselves feel better, and it's motivated by ego.

My real reason is I'm trying to live up to my potential, and everything else is going to fall into place afterwards. The bigger I get, the more I live up to my potential, the more I'm going to be able to help people. The more people I'm able to naturally inspire, the more money I'm going to be able to make, the more solutions I'm going to be able to provide to the market, the more investments I'll be able to make in small startups that are looking for capital. It's like, I'm getting to the point where I want to play Monopoly in real life. Not in some sense of I'm trying to have the biggest company, I want to be able to do what I want.

I want to be able to buy Boardwalk, buy part of it. I want to be able to put hotels on it. Yeah, yeah. I want to have Mashman hotels in the future too. Yeah, I already got the Instagram account. So yeah. I don't have a ton of different things. I know I'm talking like a crazy maniac, but I'm just another [guy].

Isaac Mashman33:52

Today I was on a call with a prospect and he's like, so, you've only been in the business for a year and a half, and I'm like, well, technically it's been more like four. I've only been incorporated for the past year and a half, but I went through a variety of reasons to overcome his objection of, I might have only been incorporated for the past year and a half. I'm able to do X, Y, and Z, and as I kept going, I'm like, this list is getting long. I'm thinking to myself, and I'm not trying to brag right here, I'm being, like, dead ass, very transparent, like, this is concerning because I'm going through.

I'm like, okay, I published a book, it just hit number one, by the way, [in] this field, and I'm like, okay, that might have sounded a little bit ego driven, but it was truthful because I'm like, where's this line between ego and truth? I'm like, I've done all of this. So it's like, I'm just stating what I've done. It's not to impress you, but to impress upon you. Then I'm like, holy shit. I'm like, I can only imagine by the time I scale up, I'm going to have like an entire laundry list. But then I think that that's the entire point of building out your personal brand.

So it speaks for you to where if the person actually does the due diligence, they're able to know everything you've done. They're able to know your story. The guy didn't do his due diligence prior to getting on the discovery call, of actually his research. But I will say in the next decade, I'm not so much concerned about it moving forward. But again, I'm aware of it. I'm also aware of my personality traits.

Isaac Mashman35:25

I had somebody deliver a washer and dryer. I went down and I'm like, hey, do you need help bringing this up the stairs? Cause we're on the third story. He's like, out of the 16 years I've been doing this, you're like the third or fourth person I've ever had offer to help. I'm like, I want to make sure that I'm still that guy a decade from now. The person opening up the door for the stranger, the person who's grabbing a cup of coffee if I'm going out, or going in and buying something for a homeless person, like whatever it might be, I want to make sure that I'm still that person.

Because that's going to keep me grounded and continue being able to relate to a degree with other people who were in my place a decade ago.

Isaac Mashman37:04

It'll eventually come out. Well, the other thing, the final aspect that I'll mention, is whenever you're building out your personal brand online, when you meet somebody for the first time, now you have a standard to live up to. You have an expectation that is automatically set for you. If you're faking it, if you ever meet somebody who knows you online and you're, like, not there, and you don't know what you're talking about, the person's going to be like, fraud. Yeah, you could portray it online, but not in real life. So that's also a reason why you need to go out, and iron sharpens iron. Like you need to go out and have conversations with people to make sure that you're still sharp, even if the majority of your business is online.

If you take those relationships offline, which you should be doing, and doing in real life, meet and greets, or not virtual, but book signings or whatever it might be, to where you're still sharp enough and where you're that same exact person offline as you are online. It's not so much about authenticity. That's a word that gets thrown around that nobody knows. It's just puke. Like in my opinion, nobody quite breaks it down and like what is authenticity? It's you, that's it. It's straight up you. That's all it is. In its most holistic form. Yeah, anybody listening to this, Justin, I would just say that they need to make sure that they're maintaining who they are, everywhere they go, to every person they speak to, even their parents.

Like, be real with your mom. If she's not doing what you know she needs to be doing, put her in check, hold her accountable. You know, family members, hold them accountable. That's going to really make sure that you believe in what you've got going on, not just the other person believing in you.

Isaac Mashman39:05

Yeah, I appreciate that, man. Thank you again for inviting me on. You can find me literally everywhere at Isaac Mashman, I-S-A-A-C, M-A-S-H-M-A-N. Super simple name, biblical spelling of Isaac and mashed potatoes, mash man. But you could also pick up a copy of the book if you would like from Amazon. I'm working on getting into some other retailers as well. Personal Branding: A Manifesto on Fame and Influence. Got my podcast, which I'm going to be revamping here shortly, called Chase the Vision with Isaac Mashman. Ton of cool things in the works, man.