What's Your Vision? Featuring Isaac Mashman

Isaac Mashman0:02

My vision is to build the number one personal brand consultancy worldwide by 2035 and have a team of 500 independent consultants working for us, going out and building, not their own businesses, but helping people with their personal brands. That's the main business vision, I suppose, and then taking that and scaling into other avenues, other investments, other businesses, real estate, like we were talking about before we got started. On a personal note, I would say my vision is [to live up to] my potential, which I know I'll never meet, but it is a task worth [pursuing].

Isaac Mashman0:40

2035. There is no way in the next 12 months I'll be able to get 500 consultants that are quality, quality at least. I would love to have, I would say, 10 to 20 consultants by the end of next year. But with my main focus by 2035, it's not about setting... there's a cliche that goes, set your vision amongst the stars and at least you'll land somewhere, kind of thing. I believe that that's true. But I want to be realistic, in the sense that there is a strategy in place where we can actually hit that mark, but it's also big enough that it would make the average person uncomfortable.

Hell, it makes me uncomfortable too, to think of 500 people relying on me and relying on the business that I'm building. That's big. There's a lot of weight that falls on business owners, especially at scale. So I don't see any reason why I wouldn't want to set that grandiose vision, so to speak. Why not?

Isaac Mashman1:55

The lack in my upbringing, I would say. I don't come from a traditional holistic American family. I had a single mom, and I didn't connect with my biological father until I was already an adult.

Isaac Mashman2:13

My mom was a single working parent, so I was raised in large part by my grandparents, and I loved them deeply, loved them tremendously.

Isaac Mashman2:43

Entering into adulthood, when I found the idea of building my own business and pursuing this path of entrepreneurship, I saw it as the answer to all of my questions.

Isaac Mashman3:11

Yeah. Well, growing up, I was one of those straight-A entrepreneurs, which are very rare. Most of the time you talk to an entrepreneur and they're like, I was a D or F student. No, I was an excellent student. I graduated top 10 of my class and had a 4.44 weighted GPA. I was very studious, and school was, for the most part, relatively easy. I had a couple of classes, like AP Chem, that I just absolutely hated. My brain does not compute chemistry equations. But going into my senior year, I saw that my mom had a master's degree in business that she wasn't applying. I say this out of respect for her, but was I going to go to college, get what, a marketing degree, a public relations degree, and spend two years of my life taking biology and algebra courses and things like that that I would never use?

It didn't seem like a feasible path. So my senior year of high school, I saw these young guys who were slightly older than me involved with the industry of network marketing. Now, I already had some entrepreneurial endeavors and some influences from Instagram, obviously, some younger guys and younger gurus. I feel like I have to give them credit where credit is due. But I started to see a path opening up that I didn't know existed, that self-fulfilling, self-business path. So I took the leap of faith, jumped headfirst into the business, and hit my head a few times on the way down. It was a hell of a journey.

Isaac Mashman4:49

I don't want to just attribute money as the answer to my problems. It was the way of thinking. You cannot be involved with business if you don't have some self-development going on. [Not if] you don't study, you don't read, you don't listen, you don't learn from mentors or listen to podcasts such as your own. Seeing that there were people living lives that they actually loved, compared to lives that they hated, when the people around me didn't really like their lives (they would say, yeah, I'm fine, I'm content, but deep down I knew they hated it), the idea was really fascinating to me, and it seemed like a better option than taking the other, traditional route.

Isaac Mashman5:42

Yeah, it's interesting you say the word clarity, because I can define my entire journey as this pursuit of clarity. Part of the reason why I dissolved my public relations firm, which I was building, was because it created more questions than it did answers. The reason I say that is we were marketing it as, Mashman Ventures is a public relations firm that specializes in personal branding, and what is the business model? Consulting. That is a lot to market, that is a lot to define, and I knew that it wasn't as clear as it could have been. So it wasn't so much a decision to change paths as, let me create something new that is clear, which is Mashman Consulting Group.

We help emerging and established public figures optimize and scale their personal brands. That is extremely concise. So every business that I've been involved with, I've ultimately gotten out of in this pursuit of clarity, knowing, number one, that it wasn't something I could see myself doing long-term, and number two, that it didn't have a firm business model. For example, the music industry. When I was involved in that, I had a record label I wanted to build, and then I was managing musical talent. I knew that there wasn't a sustainable business model without locking them into aggressive 360 deals and taking it to scale. That's the only way you make money in the music industry outside of touring.

But how can you make money touring if you don't have an audience? You can't. So I went from business to business in my early career, not thinking to myself, oh, it's okay to fail, because I've never thought that that is a good thing. I think that failure is really just you give up, entirely you give up. I don't consider any of my businesses a failure. I consider it a pivot and a direction change, in the right direction ultimately. They have a lot of these statistics, and I'm really curious to know what their definition of failure is. Is that financially? Is that just because the business owner gives up?

Is it because they got sued to all hell? Is it because they went bankrupt? There are so many measurements of failure, I think, or things that we might perceive as being a failure rather than a pivot. So with my current business, I feel more clear about what I'm building than ever before, and that's a really good indicator that I'm on the right path. I believe that for anybody listening to this, [it matters that] you feel clear about what you're building. You don't have to have some 40-page business plan, but [have] at least a direction that you can go down. The reason you have a business plan is so you can get [investment].

That's the big thing that most people create business plans for. Otherwise, most entrepreneurs don't know the first thing about writing one, myself included, although I know I could. You also mentioned a business ultimately creating a job for the person. This was a mistake that I made early on as well. There's a difference between being self-employed and being a business owner. Robert Kiyosaki's Cashflow Quadrant makes that distinction, between 4% are investors and 1% business owners and 30% self-employed. Well, if you think about it, just launching your own small business and doing all of the tasks yourself means that you're self-employed. You're not a business owner. So my number one goal with launching MCG was to set the framework in place where I could bring on consultants and train them up.

[I] already have a COO that we're going to be announcing within the next month, [and we have] hiring posts [out], so I have 50 resumes I've got to go through for potential consultants. [It's about] really setting the landscape so that it can function even if I'm not there, because that is the big indicator that you have something that's working, if it can function as a self-sustaining organism.