How to Create Your Own Killer Brand

Isaac Mashman0:50

Tony, thank you so much for the invitation. [I'm] excited to have this conversation with you and Aaron.

Isaac Mashman1:09

Yeah, well, I was born and raised in Jacksonville, Florida. So I'm a Florida native. I was in Jacksonville with the best NFL team in the entire United States. Of course, the Jacksonville Jaguars, a love-hate relationship with them, but I was raised in a, I would say, lower middle class, upper poverty line family, single parent household, never met my biological father. One of those painful entrepreneur stories, which I think all of us have to a degree. So that became ultimately my strength as an adult and as somebody who doesn't come from an entrepreneurial background. My grandfather was a carpenter. I remember getting up before school and going with my grandmother to drop him off across town at the cabinet shop and picking him up afterwards.

My mom worked lower income jobs, but in management positions, a brilliant woman, very smart, very intelligent, but after divorce and after having a kid when you're young, your confidence gets shot. I think that was something she had a lot of when I was younger. So anyways, I was an excellent student. I wasn't one of these D or F entrepreneurs. I literally excelled at everything. All of my classes, I had straight A's, I had one C in my entire life on my report card and I had to go get tutoring for that. So it's not like when I made the decision my senior year to pursue business, it wasn't that, oh, I'm not good at this school thing.

No, it was a decision to go against what I worked for my entire career through kindergarten to 12th grade. I got involved with the industry of network marketing. I was in three different companies, four different times. I had a lot of really, really amazing experiences in the industry. Never made much money in it, but it's where I learned how to run [a business]. It's where I learned how to sell. It's where I learned how to communicate. That was really an awesome opportunity for me. Then yeah, Tony, not to talk for an hour here, but I went from that industry into wanting to delve into social media management maybe, and podcast management, and then went into the music industry, not as a musician.

God knows I don't really have a whole lot of talent there, but managing musical talent and building a record label. But then COVID hit. When COVID hit, it was, is this going to kill me or is this like the common cold? We didn't know at the time, and we had to cancel a concert for the musical talent that I was managing. From that point on, I lost my passion for the music thing. I realized that the only way that you can make a lot of money with a record label was at scale. It wasn't a path I wanted to delve down. Then that's when I jumped into personal branding.

At the time I was building Mashman Ventures, which was my public relations firm, until I recently dissolved that officially in the public capacity and launched my new business, which is Mashman Consulting Group, which is out of Little Rock, Arkansas.

Isaac Mashman4:47

Yes. I say the same exact thing. It's funny because we haven't made the official announcement, but he's going to be the chief operating officer for MCG, which, if I say MCG, that's the acronym for my company, easier to say than Mashman Consulting Group every time. But a couple years ago, I was out for a walk and he called me up, his name is Eric Chow. He's like, Isaac, I know that you were in MLM and I'm being approached by a company to join, it's Amway. He's like, what is your perspective on the industry? It's funny because now he's building that as well, as a supplemental thing.

Every time I call him up and talk to him, I'm like, what are you doing? He's like, oh, I have a conference down in Palm Springs. The team's doing great. I think that it's really an awesome experience. This was somebody who went to college and took that route. Just from the mentality of the association, it's like when you don't have that growing up, you jump into the water and you're thinking, okay, I don't have a lifeguard or anything. But when you're in the network marketing industry, you have other people that can hold you up and help you tread water. I think that anybody who's looking to get involved with business, spending $100 to get started as an independent business owner with literally any company with verifiable products, is one of the easiest ways to at least see if you could even be self-sufficient as a business person and have the discipline to maybe navigate that.

Isaac Mashman7:11

Ultimately, over the next decade, I want to scale it to have 500 consultants who are working with people from all across the world with their personal brands. Specifically, we have a dual business model. So 70% of the business is consulting. That's the main bread and butter. We're also building out a training platform, which doesn't have courses. We call them programs. I wanted to make sure that we have, and that I personally had, a track record before I tried to launch some course, because it's the flashy thing for internet entrepreneurs to do. It's to launch a program. Immediately after [getting] online and starting an Instagram account and a LinkedIn, the next thing you do is buy your website and then start a course.

I wanted to make sure that I had clients under my belt that have verifiable results first. That's very important for me. So having that training platform, but also having a team of 500 consultants and being the number one consulting firm in the world for personal branding specifically, because you look at McKinsey and Boston Consulting Group. They're doing billions of dollars every year off of business management consulting and aeronautics and engineering and management and all of these other things that I don't have an interest in. But I also don't know, excuse me, of any business that is building the consultants model specifically for personal branding at a very high scale and enabling independent contractors or eventually employees to go out and land their own clients.

So it's fascinating though, because I'm taking some of the best aspects from network marketing and the self-sufficiency and adopting that into my own business to where now it's, let me enable you, let me give you all the tools, let me give you all the access. This isn't some structure where you get paid more based off of what you recruit. It's not an MLM, but the consultants model will allow them to go out and also market via word of mouth rather than relying on traditional forms of advertising such as running ads or having to rely on television or radio or whatever else. So it's opening up a different avenue.

Isaac Mashman9:19

Well, it seems boring to do it on any other scale. That's the God honest but humble truth of, if you were to ask me, why are you doing this? Yes, money is important. Yes, there's an aspect of, okay, it would feel good to do this at a big scale, but also I like to have fun with things. So it's like if you start up a video game, you don't want to play the video game and not reach the max level, in my opinion. I want to get to the very highest point possible. The reason why is, well, why not? That's the best answer I could ever possibly come up with, why not? Why wouldn't you? Kind of like, what if it does work? That is something I've adopted into my own life.

Isaac Mashman10:44

Right. Well, the truth there, Aaron, is every single person has a personal brand. That is, this is a philosophical approach, but a very tactical approach, because you think about what people tell you about personal branding today. Most people will say, oh, you have to create a new personal brand, or you're creating your personal brand, or you create an Instagram account and you're creating a new personal brand. No, you have the same personal brand you had from the moment your mom pushed you out all those years ago. That is the truth. Yeah. So if you think about that perspective of, I am the only Isaac Mashman, I've been Isaac Mashman from the moment I was born.

Then in your case, if you get married and take your husband's name, you're still the same [Aaron]. You just had a little bit of a different title. That, when you realize it, you can leverage all of those connections from 20, 30 years ago, or even your high school friends and the people you went to church with or the people who are your neighbors. Every person has a perception about you. If you understand that perception, you can leverage it. Then you can also use that to grow a business or drive awareness to a cause. So personal branding is much bigger than what most people are talking about it as.

It's not just your Instagram account. It's you. Your personal brand is you. So I view this as this blue ocean opportunity here to move in and change, just like Napoleon Hill did, the first practical philosophy of success. I'm aiming to do the first practical philosophy of personal branding and actually really dive deep into this, because if I was to name off Moses, Jesus Christ, Martin Luther King, Gandhi, all of these people had personal brands. So it's not something that's new. The title is new, but the concept is.

Isaac Mashman13:38

Yes. It's so important because most people don't get in the mind of actively searching up themselves, whether that be because they feel like they're narcissists or they don't see the importance or they simply don't know. It's doing due diligence, just like you Google the reviews of a restaurant that you go out to eat at before you go. If you go and search up this Chinese buffet, you see there's one star, you're not going to go to that Chinese buffet versus the one that has five stars. So it's managing perceptions here and managing your reputation, which is an aspect of your personal brand. And, you know, I have IsaacMashman.com, but I also have at Isaac Mashman, it's the same handle across the board, because just like God, in the least sacrilegious way possible, is omnipresent, everywhere all the time, well, you need to be everywhere all the time in terms of your personal brand.

Aaron mentioned Coca-Cola earlier today. But imagine the CEO of Coca-Cola now building out his brand and being like, this is how I was able to become the CEO. This is why the company was important to me. I remember growing up, my mom used to drink Coca-Cola and I thought to myself, I would love to work for that company. Now there's this emotional connection and this attachment to not only the [company but also] the person, which helps drive revenue for the business. Realizing that there's this symbiosis that happens is something that more people should be doing, that I think we'll see more of, but we're still so early on in the internet space.

This is looking entirely different than it was five years ago. Artificial intelligence is doing things that I would have had to outsource, like doing a video. I was able to edit a new video I filmed earlier today in five minutes with captions, with zooms, with automatic music that's unique to me. A couple of years ago, I would have had to pay $50 for that one video. So it's really interesting to think about how this might evolve in the long term.

Isaac Mashman16:42

Well, I could say 100% of the clients that we work with, that I've ever worked with, they're always on social media in some capacity, whether they're consuming or they're trying to create. They just don't know what to do in order to be efficient at it. So I would take that 30,000 foot overview and ask them, what are your goals with building out your personal brand, but more importantly, your life? So it's like, I'm not a coach, I'm a consultant, there's a big difference. But I do take this understanding of, okay, well, do you want to be rich? Do you want to drive awareness to a cause?

Do you want to do it because you're vain? Coming from the entertainment industry, most of the people in entertainment wanted to make money and wanted to be famous just because. So I believe that there are three main reasons why somebody would want to build their personal brand: to make money, for vanity, or to drive awareness to a cause. So once they're able to give me that answer, maybe a combination, let's think about long term, what do you want to do? Do you want to speak on stage? Do you want to be a self-published author or a best-selling author? Do you want to have millions of people watching your videos?

Or do you want to very simply be well-known locally? I believe that there's a hierarchy with how big you take this. Whether you're the local hero or the international icon, you can reverse engineer the steps to get there. So it would be, what does your social media look like? Do you even have a marketing message? Tony, coaches are the most difficult people to work with. The reason coaches are the most difficult to work with is they're very bad about pinpointing their deliverables. So if I was to ask you, right, what do you do for a client? Oh, I helped them do X, I helped them optimize their health.

Okay, well, how do you do that? 99% of the time, they cannot even address that. They cannot give strategies off the top of their head. That is a problem because you need to be able to, with your personal brand, in 101 characters or less explain who you are and then what you do. So for example, addicted to coffee and standards, I help public figures optimize and scale their personal brands. That's my own marketing message. If I have extra space, I'll throw in businessman, author, investor, speaker, podcaster, whatever. But every single person listening to this needs to think to themselves, if I was in an elevator and somebody asked me who I am, would I even be able to explain it on the spot?

Most people can't. Right. Or what most people would do is be like, oh, I'm in real estate. I'm a realtor. Okay. What do you do? Let me go ahead and hire my aunt. Like, I don't need to necessarily hire you. So it's like, oh, no, well, I'm originally from here. I am a huge nerd. I love Lord of the Rings. Maybe I'm projecting a little bit. I help people sell their homes in less time for more take home without all of the hassle, versus the I'm in real estate, I'm a realtor. So it's like taking those little aspects and spinning them into a marketable strategy and a marketable [brand], where you look better than just everybody else, because again, it is perceptions.

Isaac Mashman21:42

Well, the idea with coaches too is, a lot of times there are ideas. It's less tangible than it is strategic. What I mean by that is, okay, well, I help improve performance. Okay, well, what does that mean? What does that mean? Or I am a high performance coach? Please, somebody tell me, is that performance sexually, in your business, in relationships? Is that helping you get up in bed? Like I know somebody, and this is probably one of the best examples of a coach that I've personally seen in my network, his name is [Robin Westerland], and he's based out of Europe, and he is a sleep coach, specifically.

He helps people with their sleep. So what he does is at 2 a.m. in the morning for us Americans, because he's six, seven, eight hours ahead, he makes a post that is, why are you still awake? Go to bed. I'm like, genius. I have no issue talking about him, and I hope he's not going to be mad at me disclosing his strategy here.

Isaac Mashman22:46

It is absolutely brilliant though because he was like, why are you still awake? So I'm like, oh, and he's like, I specifically work with business owners to improve their sleep. And, okay, what does that look like? Well then, let's go ahead and think about what your alarm is set up as, are you doing what you need to be doing throughout the day? Are you drinking caffeine? What is your diet? Are you stressed out? You know, all of these different things he's able to pinpoint, and so it's strategic and tactical versus this idealist perspective of, oh, well, it would be great to do these things. I'm telling you this, thinking that you'll get results. No, it's actually one, two, and three. Let's go down the list. Yeah. Yeah.

Isaac Mashman23:32

Oh man. Well, I've been drinking Cafe Bustelo. I love Death Wish. But the thing about that Death Wish is it's 400 milligrams of caffeine. I drink four to six cups of coffee a day. So I really can't drink that. I love it, but I'm like, I need to think long term. I don't want to be dead by the time I'm 30. So let me go ahead and lay off of this. I do love Cafe Bustelo. Lavazza is really good. I'm not really picky either. I was raised on, like, my grandmother used to drink Maxwell House, which is from Jacksonville. So it's like, I'm okay with that kind of [cheap] coffee. Because it's the same stuff I was drinking in Boy Scouts with the Scout Masters. Do we all have coffee cups?

Isaac Mashman24:24

But they don't even drink long coffee, like we do in America, they drink espresso. That's, again, traveling is so important. Because when I was there, I was like, I can't even get a long cup of coffee. I have, like, espresso, and I came to love espresso. So I brought that back with me to the States because I spent a month in the south of France around Montpellier and in the countryside. I wanted [a Nespresso] with the little espresso pods, and I'm like, I want one of those.

Isaac Mashman25:27

I add ice cubes to mine personally. I'll always add ice cubes. Every day my first cup of coffee, I'll take two to three cubes and put it in my cup. I think part of that is so I can drink it faster first thing in the morning, get the caffeine kick. But I've come to like that too, because I don't like the idea of burning my mouth. I'm just, I'm not into that. So have you tried Black Rifle Coffee? I haven't. I've been thinking about it. I need to. I support the brand. I've listened to interviews with the founders and everything. I need to try it out.

Isaac Mashman27:27

Interesting combination. Well, I believe that internet entrepreneurs need to be offline and offline entrepreneurs need to be online. That's something I've been really bullish on and something I've been thinking about quite a bit, because if, let's say, Instagram or the internet disappeared tomorrow, I could still go downtown to my chamber of commerce and shake hands with people. That's an old world thinking that people don't think about. But a couple years ago, when I was early on with this, I had a mentor at the time and he was a master connector. He did an outdoor lighting company and he was also in network marketing, so it's like you're building your network.

You either can funnel them to work with your company or to join your organization. So it's like a win-win situation regardless. I think it's brilliant. But the one thing he would do is he'd just go and meet everybody at Starbucks. That's how I met him. Shake hands and go to Rotary and go to all of these events. Business owners online who build an internet business very rarely establish local roots outside of their family and friends. So if you were to start going [out], not necessarily marketing yourself as a local business, because that can hurt you if you do it incorrectly. But there's a balance between, I'm based out of here, but I'm serving clients online.

Okay, cool. Now you can have a little bit of a local appeal, do local events, which these are things that I'm doing, even though 100% of my consultations are online. It's not like I'm going out locally in Little Rock shaking hands and saying, come to my office for a consult. That's not what I'm doing. But what I am able to do is, let's have a conference here. Let's go ahead and go to a nonprofit event, or when I do a nonprofit initiative, okay, if I'm spending money internationally, I'm matching that here locally. So now I'm this businessman who's this national businessman, locally positioned and locally located.

So you have so many different avenues that you can go down, and I think that it's not even about, I hate the word authenticity. The reason why is because if you're thinking about being authentic, you're manipulating what you're saying or doing. So you just have to do what you're doing and just put your best foot forward. If you're thinking about authenticity in your mind, you're being inauthentic. That's the God honest truth that nobody wants to admit. So that human connection is extremely important. That is one of the indicators of long-term health and well-being and how old you live to: community. Why do people go to a retirement home and then just die a couple years later?

They don't have that community that they had when they were working or when they were doing things with family and friends. Right. We just talked, Aaron, we just talked about this.

Isaac Mashman30:50

If you speak, there's no reason why you're not doing this, except you're lazy. So you can go and speak to a Chamber of Commerce or a local business event and you can film it with permission, and you might only be speaking in front of 10 or 20 people. But you can film it, position it, package that, and land speaking engagements because you show that you've been in front of those rooms. Guilty. You do not think like this. Got it. But think about that. You're in front of five. It doesn't matter if you're in front of one person or 20 people. You film it like you're speaking in front of a room of 10,000.

You're not lying. This isn't unethical. You are genuinely doing public speaking. You package that video. You post it on YouTube. You cut that into a short and a reel. You promote that. You're getting massive exposure digitally. You take that, add it to your media kit. [You send] that over to a speaker bureau for representation or to an engagement that you're wanting to speak at. They see that you're credible, they see that you can talk, and they book you. That's how easy this stuff is. It's not that challenging. It's just a matter of thinking to yourself, okay, well, what I did early on and even recently is I overlook those things that I've accomplished, or overlook those small things that I might write off as, oh, that's not important, but to other people, they're huge, because the things that you know today took you years to learn.

So a couple years ago, when you were starting out, the things that you know today are incomparable to the things that you knew a couple years ago. Keeping that in perspective is a huge thing that would give you a leg up.

Isaac Mashman33:52

I [don't] have a photographer come by right now, and again, I've been annoying the hell out of my fiancee. Can you take a photo? Can you record this? Just, earlier today she was recording a couple of videos and taking some photos and everything else. It's like, but that's as simple as it needs to be. It's not that you have to pay to have the best photographer in the city. If you have an iPhone or a Samsung or, like, a new phone, the camera does the heavy lifting for you. You can go into Lightroom and download the app and edit in two minutes and have a photo that looks really good.

Again, it's not about obsessing over all these things and complicating it. Just like you mentioned, the AI software edits out the ums and all of the pauses maybe. Those can be good because it shows the natural flow of conversation, versus if you were to edit it out and over edit it, it can become unnatural. Most people aren't thinking or noticing those ums or those sighs or those breaths, because I remember when I started out, I wanted to edit all those things out. I realized that I was the only person who recognized and noticed that, because I was aware of it when I did it. So if you're thinking about creating content, which I know all of the listeners are, don't obsess. Put out quality, don't put out trash, but don't obsess over everything.

Isaac Mashman36:50

Yeah. Man, my dad jokes are coming out today. I'm not even a dad. So I was living in California at the time. Back in 2019, I spent a summer over there and I was flown out to VidCon in 2019 by Facebook as one of the creators. I was there, I had a round trip and I could have flown back home to Jacksonville. But I left a note underneath the pillow at home, and I was living with my grandparents, and I said, hey, I'm not flying back home. So when I was there, I texted my grandmother and said, look under the pillow. It explained it. I decided to go up to [Bakersfield], California, from Los Angeles, stayed there for a few months, went over to France for a month chasing a girl, which never ended in anything, but a wonderful experience in the south of France.

Flew back home to Jacksonville, hated it for a few months, and went back out to California. That was in 2020. Then COVID started to creep out. I was living with a bunch of stoners and just guys that I never really could relate to or liked, to be frank. I was doing it because, well, I needed to. I had to, and I had [no] option. I started talking to my now fiancee. That was a connection made through Twitter, made through my personal brand. Then in August, I decided to fly out and I've been in Little Rock since. It's been this question of, do we fly and move the family and the dogs and the cats and everything back to where I'm from?

But I decided ultimately to just stay here because, yeah, I might not have the beach, but I have a cheaper cost of living with still a high standard. The houses here are literally a third of the price that they would be in Jacksonville. Jacksonville's skyrocketed in rates, insurance, everything, 100,000 plus people in the past five years kind of thing. I think that there's a huge opportunity, and you think about Little Rock, and something I'll be doing again on a local level and using this to land local press and news interviews and conversations is, Little Rock has a notoriously bad reputation for crime. It's in the top 10 list, but almost all of that crime, Tony, Aaron, it happens below the interstate.

It happens in impoverished areas, minority communities. That needs to be addressed. That needs to be solved. Little Rock aside, I'm looking out here and I have this beautiful view of a skyline in a skyscraper office. I'm able to do that for half of what it would be in Jacksonville and be able to start a family here and buy land and everything else. So I still love Jacksonville. I would love to have a mansion on the St. Johns River down the road and maybe either build the Mashman Tower here or the Mashman Tower in Jacksonville or both. But regardless, it definitely required a commitment to make a decision to stay here [rather than] go home. I think ultimately I made the best decision.

Isaac Mashman39:51

Yeah, I'd be all right if I never go back there again in my entire life. Air quality sucks. Cost of living is high. There's nothing to see, nothing to do. I'd love to go back to LA and explore other parts of California and other areas. But I went there because I had connections, and you go where your network is or you build a new network. I decided to go where my network was and the friends at the time, and I'm not really friends with anybody that I was back then. But it was a part of the story and a part of that aspect of sleeping on the floor and, you know, whatever.

I think that we all have that to some degree and I think that taking those calculated risks of what is the worst that could happen is an important thing.

Isaac Mashman40:48

Yeah. How about grass and greenery instead of dirt? It's a good point. That's a good point.

Isaac Mashman41:30

Well, you think about politically too, a lot of the reason why people left and moved to Florida and Texas was for political reasons. It wasn't the cost of living. If you're coming from California, you're not thinking about cost of living so much. You're thinking about political agreement. So part of the reason [I'm staying] here in Arkansas is it is cheaper. There are 3 million people. It's not like it's a super small, it's not Wyoming. There's not half a million people. It's still an [established state], there's a capital, like Little Rock is the capital, I'm able to see the building just right down the road, I've toured it, I saw the inauguration of Sarah Huckabee Sanders when she was in office two years ago.

So I saw this as an opportunity to have a good local community, to have a good business community that I'm able to build and nurture. I still have an airport I can fly out of, the airport is over there. It's allowing me to build something here, and more people are going to be moving here, I think, over the next decade, and seeking the natural state, making better decisions that are healthier for them, because now everybody who are native Floridians and people who are native to Texas are going to be looking to go elsewhere, because it's higher.

Isaac Mashman44:28

That is something I'm actually working on because, and I made a video about this earlier today, I believe that one of the biggest mistakes entrepreneurs make or people that are in business make is they don't treat their business like it's a business, like a corporate job. I believe that you have to treat it like that and get up at the same time. My sleep schedule is so screwed up. So this routine aspect is something I'm working towards ultimately addressing, because having a set series of tasks is going to be what you need in order to get those optimal results. So that's something I'm working on, maybe next time I come on, next year, I'll [have it figured out].

Isaac Mashman47:00

The punishment isn't as direct. That's the thing, like you mentioned, yeah, you show up late after a week or two, you're fired. When you're a business person, you're not getting fired. However, the punishment does exist, just indirectly. The punishment would be a lack of results and a lack of faith, a lack of trust in yourself, or whatever that might be. So setting, I remember I had this story kind of flash across my mind the other day of when I was in school, all of my classes were relatively easy up until the time I got into, like, AP chemistry and crap. I hated chemistry with my life blood, but I had physical education, PE, and the way that the grade was measured was based off of how quick you ran the mile.

Me, I was that chunky kid in school, like I was not healthy. So when I went into that year, I ran like an 11 minute mile, and [I needed to improve, because] it was taken at the end of the year, and that was my final exam. So what I did is I set this milestone and ultimately ran that eight minute mile by year's end and passed with an A, but the reason I did that wasn't for the physical health, it was because I knew that I would be punished if I didn't. I think setting that idea in your own mind, and setting this, okay, not so toxic, like my family's going to die if I don't do this.

That's a [shtick] in network marketing that you can get taught, like you need to set these obnoxious things, if I don't do this, the world's going to end. But you should be thinking to yourself, if I don't do this, it's going to hurt. Setting those expectations for yourself is important. That's something I'm working on myself. Yeah.

Isaac Mashman50:36

Well, those tasks also apply to building a personal brand and building up your social media or whatever it might be. Those non-negotiables of, okay, if people were to record and post one video per day for a year, their personal brand is going to look entirely different, because there's no telling if that one video will go viral one day of the week or somebody sees that consistency. We're doing a podcast and releasing an episode at the same exact time every single week. Or let's say sending out pitches and responding to emails every single day, those things add up and it doesn't seem sexy because it isn't sexy.

But it's like those are the things that, if you choose not to pitch this time, but to pitch next time, that one time you skipped might have been that one feature that you got quoted in. My Forbes feature [was] a pitch that I could have easily overlooked or could have easily said, nah, I don't know if I necessarily could quote this, or, like, maybe I won't do this. But I took the time anyway and then that was the one that I landed. So it's like those small things do add up and it's not that they're mundane or that they're not important. It's just they're easy to overlook and easy to say maybe tomorrow and brush them off.

I think that most people do not treat their personal brand as a business itself, and that is indicative of failure, frankly. So start treating your personal brand as something that has delegated tasks and has a routine and has outcomes. That can help you and work for you when you're asleep, because that's ultimately the indicator that you are building something successful, if opportunities [come], and if you get one email, when you're asleep. You're snoozing in your bed and you get one email, that means that somebody found you without you finding them. So if you have opportunities coming to you and seeking you out, that's saving you the time from having to always be the one seeking those opportunities.

Isaac Mashman56:45

[Number] two, if I could just interject, would be putting out CTAs, calls to action. That's one of the biggest things. It's like, you don't even need to have all the messages every single day, you need to at least put out the call to action so people can message you, or at least give you a list of people to go and message. So if you want to land a podcast interview, because let's say you're a coach that wants to get more exposure, which all of you do, put out a call to action and say, I want to be on your podcast. That's, Tony, how we got connected.

Isaac Mashman57:15

I have landed more interviews that way by making a quick post once a week or once every two weeks. I want to be on your podcast. Who has a show and is looking for guests, whatever variation of it is. One to two sentences, reach out and follow up with those people. Easy. That's how difficult and how complicated a CTA needs to be. You could create the biggest, the best funnel page, but if you don't even send that out to people, so people will know, it's like, that's why, oh, which is more important, branding or marketing? They are equally important, because you can have a phenomenal brand, but if nobody knows about you, it's worthless.

You could have the best marketing, but if your brand is horrible, you look like an idiot in front of these people. So you have to have a well-balanced [approach] of, okay, my brand is this, my marketing is this. Okay, I want to be a credible person. Let me market myself and do things that build credibility like landing press features, doing interviews, having conversations, being edified, and then that'll naturally send me people to [work with]. So it's like, you have to think from the 30,000 foot approach of sending the messages, putting out the CTAs, again, treating it like a business, or like you have a CRM for your business or a list of clients.

Like, I have a sheet for MCG, which is every single person I'm talking to, last contact date, what is their industry, what is their problem, what is their contact, and being able to reach out to those people and keeping track of those opportunities, having a sheet of all of the places I've been interviewed. Again, treating it and taking it seriously is one of the biggest things. If I could say one more thing, it would be the master key, if you will, of having a successful personal brand, which is positioning yourself as a public figure. That is the biggest thing because Tony Robbins is [just a person,] like you, Tony, [and] like me.

He's human. He's a man. Okay. He's taller than both of us. I know that for a fact. But he is a human like us. But we view him as this sort of God, if you will, because of how he has positioned himself. He is a public figure. He is an authority. Celebrities would not exist without psychological biases. So if you're building your personal brand, how can you manage that bias in a positive way, to where you're doing things so that you are the person speaking on stage versus the person sitting in the audience, nine times out of 10. Right. So being that person who's in front of other people is doing them a service, because you have something of value and you're helping them.

They're doing you a service by being in attendance or by following you and will naturally want to work with you and see you win just as much as you want to see them win. Right. Right. 100%.

Isaac Mashman1:00:42

Let's dive deeper and go into something even more tactical, which would be, let's say you make a post about a story at the movie theater, I don't know, whatever it is. What is your favorite movie? You get 10 people who comment on that post and they say Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Godfather, I don't know, Cars, Robots, whatever, The Lion King. So now you go through those comments and you say, oh, you didn't know this person liked this. There's a shared interest here. That's my favorite movie too, or I love that movie. Then you reach out to them and say, hey, Tony, man, thank you so much for all the recent engagement.

You send them a voice message. I saw that your favorite movie is Lord of the Rings, man. I cannot wait for the upcoming movie coming out in 2026, the new Lord of the Rings movie, man. I'm super excited about that. Anyways, just wanted to make myself known. Now you have an inlet. Now you have rapport. What is rapport? Rapport is one word. It is trust. You have this emotional connection. There is a degree of connection and a relationship there. You can find an inlet, in a way, [getting] your foot inside of the door. Right? By leveraging those small details, and that is your obligation as a professional, not as a hobbyist enthusiast coach, but as a professional, to say, I know this fact about this person, this can be a way to show them that I'm on their level.

Isaac Mashman1:03:35

[Breaking the ice] is one of the most challenging things people struggle with. So how do you break the ice? Let's say you're at a networking event, or you're even at the grocery store, and this is something I practice every time I go out. I literally, the other day, somebody was looking at coffees. I was like, I'm just going to strike up a conversation and see what I can do here. I strike up a conversation with him and I was like, man, you need to buy this coffee right here. Lavazza, you will not regret this buy. What did he end up walking out with? The one that I recommended.

[If I hadn't been convincing and hadn't made some connection, he wouldn't have paid attention or grabbed the coffee off the shelf.] Now, there are three main things, three easy strategies that you can use to break the ice, and ultimately, when you're approaching a stranger, there's this wall that you have to tear down, because they're viewing, this person might be a serial killer. You might kidnap me. I don't know, and especially guys too, guys experience this more than anything, because a girl could walk up to a guy and immediately strike up conversation, but a guy going up to a girl, it's like, oh God. So you have to think about this as a realist, mature adult here.

But you can either ask a question. So whether that be, where is the event taking place? Do you know, like, let's say you're at a conference, what room are we supposed to be in? Now there is a shared question, or if they're able to answer that question for you, that gives them leverage over you, because it makes them feel in their mind that they knew something that you didn't. That's one. The second is giving them a compliment. This is extremely easy too. If a guy is wearing a watch, compliment the watch. Immediately they will like you. Now give genuine compliments. Don't lie through your teeth, but it's like if you love that person's watch or like their ring or like their shirt or like their suit, you're like, man, you're looking dapper today.

You look great. A compliment. Then the third thing is to, let's see, compliment, yeah. So you have the compliment, the question, or the joke. So you crack a joke about them. You have to be very strategic about this. But like, let's say there is somebody who is, trying to think of a good example off the top of my head, but cracking a joke has to be very timely. You have to be very smart with how you crack a joke. But if somebody is looking at something and you see an inlet, make the joke. I can't come up with one off the top of my head.

I need to grab a second cup of coffee here. But those three things, the compliment, the joke, the question, are the easiest ways to lower somebody's objections and to lower that wall.

Isaac Mashman1:06:37

Another joke where you stand up and slap your knee. All right. Well, it's been fun.

Isaac Mashman1:09:38

Yep. That's exactly right. Yeah. Like, you consider that a beer? Literally right there. Then, but that's the thing. That's how complicated it needs to be. I feel like I've said that three or four times because so many of these strategies are so simple. They really, really are. The results can be incalculable.

Isaac Mashman1:10:19

Now, Aaron, I'm curious here. You're Canadian, aren't you? Yes. Okay. Cool. I hear it. I'm finally able to sniff out the Canadians. Good. Okay. I wanted to see.

Isaac Mashman1:12:49

Well, I would say that, speaking to a bunch of coaches here, at the center of all achievement is personal growth. Whether that means learning how to copy and paste on your computer or how to build a funnel or how to have relationships and have introductions, at the center of all achievement is personal growth. You can find me literally everywhere at Isaac Mashman, or go to my website, isaacmashman.com, or Mashman.org, run a quick Google search. It has been an absolute pleasure being able to be on and have this conversation with you, Tony and Aaron. [I encourage] people to listen to this and apply the strategy and the things that we talked about.