Practical Ways to Establish Your Brand, Visibility, and Payment Processing

Isaac Mashman0:04

How are you, man? Man, [Favour], I'm doing excellent, excited to have the conversation with you today.

Isaac Mashman0:34

When we originally got this booked and set up, I didn't realize that we had some crossover into what we both do and could have a high level conversation. I'm speaking and basically [dropping] hints, even though we haven't had the conversation, because I know that's how good this is going to be. So let's dive into it. I'm excited. I'm so happy that you're here.

Isaac Mashman1:03

Yeah, that's a long story, but I think I'll be able to summarize it in maybe two minutes. My name is Isaac Mashman. I'm originally from Jacksonville, Florida. I was born and raised there. The Jags have been through the ups and downs. We'll see how they do this upcoming season, but I was raised in a single parent household, in large part by my grandparents. [I didn't connect] with my biological father until I was already an adult, and that side of the family, I didn't know really anything about.

Isaac Mashman1:47

Going throughout school, my grandmother would always say, [Isaac], get so good so you can get paid with your mind rather than getting paid with your back. My grandfather was a carpenter, worked at a cabinet shop. I'd get up before school with my grandmother, take him across town, drop him off, get picked up after school, and go pick him up.

Isaac Mashman2:10

I went through school, I was a straight A student, I literally had one C in my life and I had to get tutoring for it. So it's not like I was one of these [dropout] entrepreneurs. I was very capable, in the top 10 of my class, one SAT test away from getting a full ride to UCF, to FSU. Going into my senior year of high school, I said, why would I do this? I decided to leave the ambitions of college, where I would have gone for a marketing degree and probably partied a lot, and got into the industry of network marketing. I saw these young guys that were around my age, a little bit older, and looked up to them as mentor figures.

I saw that there was this alternative way of living. I decided to get into the industry. I had my first business trip when I was 17, went up there and had dinner with the vice president of the company, 70 hours of travel time to go from Jacksonville to Minnesota for this event. It was a great experience, but over the years I decided to leave the industry. I jumped from business to business hoping that I could figure out what I wanted to do and the vehicle that I could build, which eventually landed me in the consulting space, specifically for personal branding. I see that there are so many agencies, so many businesses, but very few actually help the business owner.

This is an untapped, unexplored territory that is becoming [more] prominent. Hence, here I am, and I launched a brand new consulting firm last month. I'm excited to dive into that a little bit too.

Isaac Mashman4:22

Well, I think that opens up a [conversation]. The syllable part is an aspect that I've never even thought of. That's very wise to mention. What I did was very counterculture in naming my businesses. Every business that I've named for myself is against what most people recommend, because I named it after [myself].

Isaac Mashman4:50

It took me going into high school and once I got into this entrepreneur thing to realize that maybe this name that I once hated is my greatest power, because I'm not competing with anybody for the credibility. I'm not competing in the space for Mashman. Now, you even think about the long-term vision if you're choosing a name: do you want it to be something that you eventually exit from and sell? If you want to sell it, you do not name it after yourself. If you're trying to build a business that you pass on to your kids, and it's known that, hey, dad was working in the office, he built this company from the ground up, and I'm taking over, the old Americana feel with the [kid] in the suit.

If you're doing that, name it after yourself, fine. But you need to make it visible. This is one of the big aspects in choosing a name. If you're competing with other people, like the podcast agents, and you're doing superhero podcasting, you can go to a site called opencorporates.com and insert other companies that have that name. If you're superhero marketing, you could probably find 100 companies that have that same exact name. So what does that mean for you? You're competing with essentially 100 other businesses for trademarks, copyrights, visibility in Google, social media handles, and everything else. So in choosing a name, you need to find something that's unique and [clear about] the message.

This is part of the reason why I dissolved my public relations firm, Mashman Ventures, because it was a lack of clarity about what we were offering. So Mashman Ventures is a public relations firm that specializes in personal branding. What's the business model? Consulting? If you think about that, it was better than my previous endeavors, but I knew that I could take it a step further and make it even better. So that's why I decided to go with Mashman Consulting Group and make it so easy to digest and understand. If you have a difficult time communicating it, how can you expect another person to effectively communicate something you yourself struggle with?

So it needs to be unique, needs to be very specific, and then from there you can go ahead and start putting things behind it. I don't think that you need to start with the brand colors and all that other stuff. Those things will fall into place naturally. You could do some really creative techniques as well.

Isaac Mashman7:04

Think about these different aspects of launching your own business. Once you have the name, the rest of it falls in line much easier.

Isaac Mashman8:04

This might go down as one of my favorite interviews, frankly, just with the quality of questions. You're including your own insights on directing the conversation, and I absolutely love this conversation so far. There are a couple of questions layered in there. Let me start by explaining the big difference between personal brands and a business brand, or any other brand. Your personal brand is you. I am Isaac Mashman. You are [Favour]. I'm not going to pronounce your last name. That's just me being honest. You can laugh at me later. But you are [Favour]. I'm Isaac Mashman. If you think about the comedians we follow, Kevin Hart, Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, Joe Biden, Donald Trump, all these people have their personal brands, and the people that are the most successful are those that have consciously erected and built theirs.

If you think about the pharaohs or the kings of England or even Moses or Jesus Christ or the Prophet Muhammad, all of these people had personal brands. We know them throughout history thousands of years later. So you as a business owner in 2024 or an entertainer or comedian or an author, you're able to give the emotions and build your reputation around, hey, this is who I am, this is what I'm associated with. Now from there, you can launch a business, and because you're associated with that business, it automatically has trust and credibility. Say you have been an industrial engineer for 20 years. You launch your own engineering firm, you could say, this is backed by 20 years of experience and your business is no longer going to have to fight as hard for business because there's automatic trust in association with you.

Now, I'm referring to this from a marketing message standpoint. This is something that so many small businesses completely mess up on: they use their business page as their personal page, and it's like, that's the worst thing that somebody could do. Your personal page is meant for first person use. Your business page is used for third person use. If you were to go to my profile, you have to practice what you preach, I help create, maintain, and sell unrivaled personal brands. But now you go to MCG's page, we help create, maintain, and scale unrivaled personal brands. If you go to find a restaurant to eat at, all of these businesses are categorized by these little price tags.

So the fast food restaurant is going to be one dollar sign. A sit down mom and pop restaurant is two. Maybe a steakhouse like Longhorn is going to be three. Then a Ruth's Chris or one of these major Las Vegas Gordon Ramsay Hell's Kitchen kind of restaurants will have four different dollar signs. Those dollar signs serve as a promise. Think about it. Those dollar signs are basically promising that if you're coming here and paying four dollar signs' worth of money, you're going to be getting this quality of food, this quality of experience. There's going to be a dress code. You're not going to have to worry about women and children crying.

You're not going to have to worry about those different things that you might [run into] going into a mom and pop restaurant. There are expectations that are set in stone. So when you're building a business and thinking about your brand, I knew that MCG was going to be a black and white color scheme. I knew the logo would be bold and kind of corporate, but not so much so that it would be off-putting. I knew that I wanted to build something that was premier and luxury, but also accessible. Now I'm able to start taking these actions to make the website clean, keeping the color schemes consistent, and every time I'm working with a client, providing a degree of experience, ultimately, all of their problems get solved.

So when you're choosing this, you have to keep these things in mind so you can keep that brand consistent. With a consistent brand, you can scale it. If you have that consistent scalable brand, you can have a business that's existing well past the day that you're dead. Charles Schwab, think about the bank, the investing company, was named after Charles Schwab, [and the] Armour meat company. All of these big businesses had one person, and ultimately now we follow their name, and it exists well past their deaths. That's really exciting if you're thinking legacy. If somebody's interested in that, I think there's a lot to digest.

Isaac Mashman13:22

Well, this goes back to choosing the name that is visible, the name that you're not fighting a bunch of other people for. Because if you were fighting superhero marketing and you launched superhero marketing ABC, you're going to be fighting with all these other superhero companies. So now if you have the unique name, you can get the same social media handle across the board: Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat. If you can get the same handle across every page, that means that there's no confusion. If you had, let's go with again superhero marketing, then you did superhero agency, and then you did superhero media, and you have superhero and then you do an underscore, it makes it confusing and it looks horrible.

You might think that looks are, you know, very, I don't know, like, you shouldn't judge a book by its cover, but frankly, if I see a book and the cover is horrible, I'm not going to pick it up, right? It needs to have something that's appealing. So I'm making sure that it's the same sort of beauty handle, having your own domain that is also the same as your social media handles if possible. Now, this was a challenge because I just launched MCG last month. I dissolved the firm and made that announcement on May 22nd, and I immediately launched the rest and have an office space I'm moving into this week.

When I was coming up with the name, Mashman Consulting Group, it's easy to say but very hard and long to type out every single time. So am I going to have MashmanConsultingGroup.com as the main website domain? No, that's like 22 characters long, so I decided to do MashmanCG.com. I knew I wouldn't be able to get Mashman Consulting Group on all of the social media platforms. Twitter, or X, has a character limit of 15 characters. Isaac Mashman is 15 characters exactly. If my name was one syllable longer, I wouldn't be able to even get my name as a handle. So what about MashmanCG? Same domain, same social media handles.

I could say you could follow us at MashmanCG across the board. It's convenient, it's memorable, it looks good. So there's trust, and with that trust and credibility, you can monetize that by asking for the close. Especially, depending on what your business is, making sure your brand correlates with the business. So it's like if you're lawn care, having some [nods] to lawn and yard work, you're going to want to use the color green, going back to the paper, for example. On a higher level conversation about visibility, social media will do a lot of the work for you. You'll naturally be able to take up the first page of Google just with your social media handles.

But you also need to be considering maybe getting a knowledge panel, right, working towards that, so it looks like an actual corporation. Then [get] a Google My Business page, especially if you're doing a local service, a local business, less important for an internet business but still a good strategy. But having a Google My Business page is a place to collect all of these reviews, host all of this information. Now, if your website establishes a backlink in Google, Google, being the number one search provider, is going to say, oh, this business is using us for their primary use. Let's promote them more. You could have your reviews there, your phone number, all of that.

So when somebody searches, oh, I need a pressure washer near me or I need a lawyer near me, you're going to show up and compete with all of these other lawyers that have more reviews or less reviews, and [Google's] going to naturally be able to promote you, allowing you to get some organic traffic. This works, and this is the oldest [trick] in the book for the past 20 years for local service providers. Now, for businesses primarily focused online and on the internet, you have tools like Trustpilot to where you could direct your clients to go leave positive reviews. Then all of these sites will naturally have their own directories that you can start showing up in.

They also have very high domain authority. Now, what is domain authority? It basically is how reliable is this domain. How is domain authority built? Your backlinks, through more information, how old the domain is, all of that, which is pretty much the same as your credit score if you think about it. Your domain authority is like your credit score in Google's eyes and other search engines. Taking steps to improve your visibility and having more touches with clients and prospects will allow you to stand out and dominate the competition.

Isaac Mashman18:38

Yeah, well, I think that understanding that every single action that you take will ultimately improve or negatively affect your reputation [is key]. Every single action has that impact. I've been on social media long enough to see some big name public figures post an image that is blurry. Why would you post something that isn't even full HD? It looks horrible, like a blurry image. That's a horrible look. I don't think you should obsess over all of those things to the point of inaction, but keeping up that expectation and taking the time to get your images posted in as many places as possible. For example, Google, when creating and understanding what to promote, it's looking at all of these different websites and saying, all right, well, this is the same name, the same image, the same look.

Okay, this is [the same] person. Because Google's trying to come to a decision on, is this the same subject matter? If they can come to that decision and find all this information and compile it, that's how you get a knowledge panel. So if you search up my name, Isaac Mashman, you're going to see a bunch of different images. Google's not just pulling from my Instagram or from my Pinterest. It's pulling from Crunchbase because I have my image up there for my startup profiles. I have it on my website, on Twitter, a whole bunch of different places. So you need to think about distribution and even getting into press articles, right, if we wanted to veer into a little bit of press and PR, offering images that Google's also going to pull.

Then headlines, and that's how you establish links and domain authority. The other thing I wanted to mention is this is a tip that's quite radical that I've come up with over the past couple of months, which is you should never use the same image twice. Aside from that, you do want to have the same profile picture and the same header, but if you think about it, you should be getting new pictures every single week. Whether that's a quick grab of you out for dinner, behind your desk, or hanging out with your wife, you need to be creating fresh content. If you have one image that you use for your website, profile picture, podcast cover, you can use it for promotion and speaking materials.

Is this the only photo you have? That right there, even for your business, it's like, how many times are you going to post the same tip?

Isaac Mashman22:36

I think it's interesting to know that, in this new stage, I feel like everybody was in this ClickFunnels era for a couple of years, and it was high level. Now I feel like everybody is basically white labeling payment processors. I've had some conversations lately, and I'm pretty sure you do not build this dashboard. I think this is white labeled. I'm not here to argue about white label businesses, if it works. Talking about fees, you might think that starting out and making $50,000 a year is great, and then you're paying a 2.9% fee, and okay, whatever, it gets you from point A to B.

Isaac Mashman23:30

Then you start thinking about, in this perspective, where you're delegating funds. You delegate people for tasks, where you're delegating funds for outcomes. So thinking about the payment processing, it was interesting because I haven't decided on the payment processor yet for MCG. I've been having conversations. We've been temporarily using [Cash App] for business. But then I also think about how they've been changing their persona from, oh, this looks scammy, to, well, it's actually the easiest way to file taxes.

Isaac Mashman24:02

I'm thinking about long-term, but then I realized, oh, Cash App actually has less fees. It's literally 0.6% cheaper to use for business than Stripe. So long-term, I'm trying to make these decisions that might seem minuscule, but if I'm building a hundred million dollar company over the next decade with a thousand consultants, [do I] want to continue paying millions of dollars in fees, or could I get it down lower and locked in at maybe 1% or 1.5%? Do your research and use AI like ChatGPT, or go in real quick with Google Gemini and say, analyze the top payment processors, their pros and cons, the fees we're paying, and other stuff, and you could come to a proper decision.

Like filing taxes, nobody talks about that. You realize, oh, you have Social Security, tax, withholding for Medicare, and all this other crap that I personally hate. So it's like, you need to find things that make your life easier and think long-term.

Isaac Mashman26:46

Alright. There are two parts to this. The first is to reverse engineer what worked. For myself, building out my personal brand, I looked at public figures and I said, what did they do to get to that point? Then I started taking those action steps to allow me to get there. Speaking about a business specifically, let's say you are like, give me a business model, like a niche. Flowers. Okay, so boutique shop, let's go ahead and ask questions. Do you want it to be a direct to door flower shop? Do you want it to be a boutique, or do you want it to be something that's retail that scales into a nationwide brand?

I would say retail. Retail. Okay, something that's scalable. So the name needs to be recognizable. It needs to have a boutique feel when you walk in, but not boutique prices, and something that also has a big presence on social media. It has a big presence online. I remember in Florida, in Jacksonville, there was a flower shop called [Coons Flowers]. Every single year they put out Christmas decorations in the front. They had this big open windows spot. It was a two-story flower shop, and they had this big window. You could go with your family around Christmas time and see Christmas decorations. My mom took me when I was a kid, and my great-grandfather took her when she was a kid.

That kept us coming back. Now again, they weren't retail, but they created an experience that was memorable. So you need to think about, okay, if you're doing flowers, then you need to get into the logistics side of things of where you're getting the flowers, [whether] you're growing them. I would take the biggest flower company, run a quick Google search, and look at the number one flower shop around the United States, reverse engineer what they have done from a logistics standpoint, from a brand standpoint, and then you could start working and fulfilling that. Then you have the other side, which I was going to talk about: you have reverse engineering, and then you go into [forward] thinking, progress.

So you're thinking about what is new today, what tactics exist today that didn't exist back then. Podcasting. This is just an example here. I know that we were talking about the importance of having a show or leveraging other shows. By coming onto your show, I'm reaching your audience, and you're doing all of the work for me. That's kind of a crazy thing to think about. A lot of the shows that I've lately been on, they've taken the episodes, they've stripped them, they've made social media posts, they've posted the video. They've written the descriptions, they've sent all the materials. As a guest, it makes my life easy.

If you're [running] a business, or the flower shop, [you could be] going on shows and podcasts that might be gardening related. They might be talking about unique startup ideas. You can go on different shows, leverage their audiences, get in front of new people, or you could even run a sponsorship deal. This is a strategy that we're going to adopt. We're going to start sponsoring podcasts and say, hey, this episode is now sponsored by Mashman Consulting Group, and go into it.

Isaac Mashman29:45

[forward] thinking ideas, tied with reverse engineering strategies, allow you to become that number one flower shop in the nation.

Isaac Mashman30:37

Yeah, absolutely. This is good too, because I don't oftentimes get to speak about business branding on a high level. I'm usually more about the personal brand and content creation and what they could do for press. So this is a really refreshing conversation for me as well that I really adore. You can find me everywhere at Isaac Mashman, and you can go to my website, isaacmashman.com, or more easily [MashmanCG.com], and I have all the information there about my companies.