What's Your Vision? Featuring Isaac Mashman
Guest: Isaac Mashman · September 27, 2024 · 9 minutes
Transcribed from the episode audio and edited for names and terms. Speaker labels are assigned automatically and can occasionally place a line with the wrong speaker; the episode itself is the record.
Host
and telling me about your vision.
Isaac Mashman
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 their own, not business, but helping people with their personal brands. That's like the main, I suppose, business vision and then taking that and scaling into other avenues, other investments, other businesses, real estate, like we were talking about before we got started. And on a personal note, I would say my vision deliver with my potential, which I know I'll never meet, but is a task worth
Host
undertaking and at least pursuing. Very broad and big question. Well, you mentioned 2025.
Isaac Mashman
Why put a date on that 2025? 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 my main focus by 2035 is it's not about setting there's a cliche that goes, set your vision amongst this, you know, amongst the stars, at least you'll land somewhere kind of thing. And I believe that that's true. But I want to be realistic in the sense of there is a strategy in place to where we can actually hit that mark, but also be big enough to where it would make the average person uncomfortable.
And I mean, hell, that makes me uncomfortable too to think 500 people relying on me and relying on the business that I'm building is, you know, big. There's a lot of weight that falls on business owners, especially at scale. And so, I don't see any reason why I wouldn't want to set that grand grandiose vision, so to speak. Why not?
Host
Oh, I miss I miss your time. I thought it was 2025. And now you said 2025. So that makes more clearer. So you see, you can see farther ahead. That's 10 years. Yeah, that's awesome. Where did this vision come from, Isaac?
Isaac Mashman
The lack of my upbringing, I would say, I don't come from a traditional holistic American family. I had a single mom, I didn't connect with my biological father until I was already an adult. Hated and growing up, hated my last name. I would say that we were on the upper end of the poverty line and lower middle class. My mom was a single working parent. I was raised in large part by my grandparents, loved them deeply, loved them tremendously. And growing up, I wasn't the kid who had, you know, the best teeth, who had the best clothes, who had the best shoes, who had the best everything.
And I was grateful for what I did have. I never went, you know, hungry. The food was definitely something that, you know, like I didn't, you know, have to eat out of trash cans or have like an impoverished upbringing, but I didn't want that because it made me uncomfortable. And so 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
Host
and all of my problems. How does it tell me more about that? In what capacity? How did you see that growing up, this was the answer to all the problems?
Isaac Mashman
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, graduated top 10 of my class, had a 4.44 weighted GPA, like it was very studious. And school was for the most part relatively easy. I had a couple classes like AP Kim that I just absolutely hated. My brain does not compute for chemistry equations. But going into my senior year, I saw my mom had a master's degree in business that she wasn't applying. And I say this out of respect for her, but I was 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 would I would never use.
And it didn't seem like a feasible path. And 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. And now I already had some entrepreneurial endeavors and some influences from Instagram, obviously, some younger guys and younger gurus. And 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. And that was that self fulfilling self business path. And so I took the leap of faith, jumped headfirst and the business hit my head a few times on the way down.
You know, it was a hell of a journey. But at the same point, I never thought about the idea of making more than $5,000 a month, let alone $10,000 and then $20,000. It's like those numbers to me were so remarkable because, you know, I can see now that I've made more in one month than some of my family members have made working three months, you know? And it's like, that's a crazy thought. And it can make you uncomfortable, but I don't wanna just attribute money to being the answer to my problems, but the way of thinking. You cannot be involved with business if you don't have some self-development going on.
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. And 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, oh, 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
Host
that I was set up for. And the businesses that do hit one or two year mark, likely to fail enough that increases by the day. The reason being, most entrepreneurs are not prepared or they don't know what to do. They don't have much clarity about it. So it's tough to your story about that.
Isaac Mashman
Yeah, it's interesting you say the word clarity because I can define my entire journey as this pursuit of clarity. And part of the reasons why I dissolved my public relations firm, which I was building, was because it created more questions than it did answers. And 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 a decision to change paths in so much as let me give something new that I could create 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. And so every business that I've been involved with, I've ultimately gotten out of in this pursuit of clarity, knowing that number one, it wasn't something I could see myself doing longterm. Number two, didn't have a firm business model. So for example, the music industry, when I was involved in that, I had a record label I wanted to build and then managing musical talent. And I knew that there wasn't a sustainable business model without locking them in with 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, right? And so I went from business to business in my early career, not thinking to myself that, oh, it's okay to fail because I've never thought that that is a good thing. And I think that failure is really just you give up, entirely you give up. I don't consider any of my businesses a failure. consider it a pivot and a direction change in the right direction ultimately. And 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 necessarily perceive as being a failure rather a pivot. And so with my current business, now I feel more clear with what I'm building than ever before. And that's a really good indicator that I'm on the right path. And I believe that anybody listening to this, if you feel clear about what you're building and you don't have to have some 40 page business plan, but at least a direction that you can go down, right? The reason you have a business plan is so you get investing.
Like, that's like 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. And you also mentioned a business ultimately creating a job for the person. And this was a mistake that I made early on as well, is there's a difference between being self-employed and being a business owner. Robert Kiyosaki's cash flow quadrant makes that distinction between 4% are investors and 1% business owners and 30% self-employed, right? Well, if you think about it, just launching your own small business and you doing all of the tasks means that you're self-employed, you're not a business owner.
And so my number one goal with launching MCG was to set the framework in place to where I could bring on consultants and train them up already, have a COO that we're going to be announcing within the next month, hiring posts, so I have 50 resumes I gotta go through for consultants potentially, and really setting the landscape to where 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 without the owner being present. Thank you for being here today. I'm really happy that you tuned in to Vision Pro's Live.
I'm looking forward to seeing your reactions as these episodes continue to move forward. This is gonna get more and more fun. We'll have more and more engagement as well when bike people to participate in the show. And thank you for giving us your time and attention. Have an excellent time building out your vision and becoming a Vision Pro yourself.