When It Worked: Isaac Mashman

Isaac Mashman0:15

Yes, yes, currently living in Little Rock, Arkansas.

Isaac Mashman1:08

Well, I know the answer, but my American brain is not saying table tennis, it's saying ping pong. But it's B.

Isaac Mashman1:46

Well, that's the thing, and as an avid coffee addict, I feel like if I get this wrong, I just need to retire and probably move to Australia and just live in...

Isaac Mashman2:05

I'm going to say milk foam, because on top of the milk foam, then you put the whipped cream or you put the chocolate sprinkles.

Isaac Mashman2:42

Yes, and I'm doing process of elimination. Obviously it's not Lucky Charms or Cap'n Crunch. [Count Chocula's] chocolate, and I don't think that that would make sense to have a pink monster, so I would say D, Franken Berry.

Isaac Mashman3:50

So I'm thinking that this probably originated in Italy, and mango is not even close to that part of the world. Apricots, I doubt it. I'm really leaning towards strawberries, because strawberry is fresh.

Isaac Mashman4:22

I am going to do, I want to [save] the 50/50. I feel like that would be fun. Let's do the 50/50 split.

Isaac Mashman5:37

I [lived] in California too. I actually had one of the roommates at the time, and he would go to Los Angeles and get a bunch of Mexican treats and candies. I've been using rims and [paletas].

Isaac Mashman5:53

Of course. Now, I drank those growing up. The mandarin orange, that was always a treat my mom used to get.

Isaac Mashman6:21

It's not Switzerland. I know that for a fact, and it's unlikely to be Finland. So because it says Bjorn, and Bjorn is Nordic, normally you think Norway. I'm torn, because there were also Vikings, historically speaking, that were in Sweden. [I'm] a major nerd. I'm going to go with Norway and lock that in and not do my [lifeline].

Isaac Mashman7:02

Well, that's a whole part of entrepreneurship sometimes. You have to take calculated risks, and that one [was] failing forward.

Isaac Mashman7:26

Yeah, so just for anybody who's listening or watching, [I'm] holding a copy of my first book, Personal Branding: A Manifesto on Fame and Influence, which I published in November of 2021, and it was something that was years in the making. I wanted to write a bunch of other books. I wanted to write an autobiography, but being as young as I am, I didn't think that it would make sense yet. I'll do that when I'm 80. But I wanted to do something, number one, because writing a book is a huge boost to your credibility. Number two, it's a way for you to build and give people something to learn more about you or learn more about your expertise, and that goes back to building trust, i.e.

credibility. I decided on the subject of personal branding really because that was my business, so it just made sense. I knew that if I started there, I could obviously do other books in the future. So the book is rather short. It's 55 pages. But the premise of it is to basically explain the what and why of personal branding. What is your personal brand, and then why is it important to build it? There are a lot of misconceptions online. With the rise of the internet, people think that their personal brand is only limited to Instagram or only limited to LinkedIn or only limited to Twitter and social media and the internet.

But actually, you've been building your personal brand since before you were born. Your parents decided your name, your political affiliation, the religion you practiced, and a whole variety of other things. As you grow older, you're able to consciously manipulate and shift and shape your personal brand to whatever means you want. So I wanted to kind of give that introductory course. That's the manifesto. I'm working on a second edition, which is coming out late next year, so November of 2024, which I'm excited to do. And more specifically, I'm really excited because the day that we're recording this, the Audible version, the audiobook version, officially came out. So I'm sending everybody that knows me over to Audible to be able to listen to me narrate the words.

Isaac Mashman9:38

Well, [I say] the steps to consciously building your personal brand, because you've already been building it, whether you like it or not. That means that you have previous notions about you that you can use to your advantage, previous connections you made in your career, even when you didn't realize what you were doing, that you're able to fall back on and message, network, and leverage. Now, in order to be effective at this, you have to ask yourself, why do you want to build your personal brand? What are you looking to gain from it? Are you looking to drive revenue? Are you looking to basically improve vanity metrics, which there's nothing wrong with?

Do you want to drive awareness to a cause that you care about? So understanding what you're looking to gain is where you need to start. Then from there, you can go into the question of what do you want to be known for. Do you want to be known in this particular trade, outside of your name? So I'm Isaac Mashman. I'm not the personal branding guy. My personal branding work is an aspect of me. It's my profession, but it is not my personal brand. So it's the same thing for you. What do you want to be known as? Then from there, [it's] the steps that you can take to get there, so that is the how.

Then you can go into strategies that are very niche or very specific, like building out your social media, buying your domain, writing a book, creating a podcast, getting on podcasts, like what I'm doing right here with you, Julian.

Isaac Mashman10:58

Well, the best way to actually say this: in my manifesto, I say that branding is what you are known as, and then marketing is how you can get more people to know about you. So with your personal brand, you can be Julian, and then from there, the software guy, the podcast guy. Then you can go and focus on marketing channels that can get more people to know about Julian, the software guy, the podcasting guy. It's the same thing for anybody listening to this. If you're a dentist and you own a dentist's office, the marketing is how you can get more people to go there. The branding is, okay, you are a dentist, you are in the specific area, you've been doing it for 20 years, you've had 20 successful surgeries, you have 20 articles that you've written that are on the subject.

It doesn't just apply to the internet and marketing space. It also applies to face-to-face, brick and mortar businesses as well. Those face-to-face interactions are ways that you are marketing yourself, and...

Isaac Mashman12:17

Look at what you've already accomplished. This goes back to, I believe that there are several different stages of learning or awareness. So you have the unconscious incompetent: you don't know what you don't know. Then you have the conscious incompetent: you know that you need to improve something. Then you have the conscious competent, which means that you know that you are doing things that are proactive or things that are good or conducive to your success. Then you have the unconscious competent, where you're naturally just flowing and you're naturally doing things that are beneficial for you. And you're moving in this direction now of conscious competence, to where you know that you need to do something with your personal brand.

So, starting with that awareness and going back to the question, if you have already built a career for yourself, let's say you have been in a career for 20 years, you have awards and accolades that you've never leveraged but you have to your name, you have certain certifications, you have certain accomplishments, let the world know about that. [On stage], I speak about the mindset of the public figure. You have to portray yourself as a public figure if you want to be seen and respected, because think about how many people are on this planet. You have 8 billion people on this planet. You have 4 billion that are on the internet, and you have at least a billion that are trying to create their brand and get attention.

So how are you cutting through that noise? By portraying yourself as that public figure and as that authority, you're able to cut through that noise, gain interaction, etc. Now, the question of what can you do: what do you do if you do not have anything to your name, any authority? You have to start at zero. You start at zero followers, and with every single interaction, you have an opportunity to connect with somebody and build that relationship and build that momentum. I have a strategy called the Power of Three, which basically breaks down how you can build your personal brand very early on with no money and very little effort.

It starts with networking and connecting with three new people every single day. If you connect with three people over the span of 90 days, you now have 270 people who now know you, who know what you do, because you have to have a profession, you have to make money. It's not like you are a nobody. You are somebody, or you at least have some interests that other people might also find interesting, and you just...

Isaac Mashman14:45

Well, the hardest part was actually the first sentence. I had a bunch of ideas, like I mentioned, and other than that, I came up with the title. But then I have the title [and the] idea in my mind, but how do I get what I'm thinking onto the pages of a book? One day I was walking, and it was a time that I was least expecting it. This is true to success. There are plenty of people online, like Jim Kwik, that talk about how your best ideas come when you're the most relaxed and you're the most comfortable. I was out walking, and I had the idea for, what if there was something so powerful?

I was like, that is the start. As soon as I had that first sentence, I then started to let the information flow. I had about a page and a half done, and then I sat for about a month and a half and [didn't] do anything, and then I just kept going and building. And then obviously I'm self-published. I didn't go through [a publisher]. I published through my public relations firm specifically, if you were to go on Google. But being somebody who's self-publishing my book, I had to understand distribution. I had to understand what an ISBN number is. This goes to anybody that might want to write a book in the future: you have to think about not only the manuscript you're providing and what you're actually portraying and what you're writing down (you want to make sure it's quality), but you have to think about distribution, which is how you are getting your book distributed and into multiple retailers.

Then you have to think about marketing, which is how you drive sales, because distribution and marketing are two separate things. Distribution is how you get your book on a bunch of channels, and marketing is how you can get people to actually view those channels and then make a purchase. That comes by leveraging your personal brand and those connections that you have.

Isaac Mashman16:30

It's funny, I just received an email in my inbox on this subject from one of the companies that I used for publishing, for distribution specifically, not publishing. There's a term in the industry that I learned today called going wide, and I'm always bullish on getting your book and getting your personal brand on as many places as possible. You have to be omnipresent. Now, what is omnipresence? Typically it's referred to when speaking about God. God is everywhere all the time. So how can you be omnipresent in the least sacrilegious way? How can you basically have people coming to you without you coming to them first, without you being the person who approaches them?

Similar to how this interaction happened: we connected using a platform, and I had no idea who Julian was. I had no idea about the When It Worked podcast until you approached me. Now, if I did not do something right with my personal...

Isaac Mashman17:23

I say that out of love and with all due respect. So I would always recommend that you get on as many channels as possible. One of the mistakes that I made, well, not necessarily a mistake, but one of the things that I could have done better, was I only used Amazon's expanded distribution for my book. Now, Amazon gets you on a bunch of retailers through expanded distribution, and that's great. But then the e-book was limited. And even with the paperback, I could have used a different distributor that might have had a different pricing structure, and there are pros and cons here. But by going through new channels in 2023, nearly two years after I published my book, I'm still looking for ways to increase the distribution.

I have gotten on over two dozen new platforms. The audiobook version will be on literally four dozen platforms in the coming months, and that is all done meticulously to increase that distribution, which also helps SEO and what is popping up online. I don't want to bore everybody with so many meticulous strategies, but they all count.

Isaac Mashman18:35

Well, number one, I use it as an introduction. So if I'm out and about and I have a copy of my book with me, it costs me two bucks to buy the author copy, so I might as well hand it out as my business card. That's great, being able to walk in the airport and say, hey, this is my book, this is my picture, kind of thing. Now, obviously, my picture is not in the back of this edition. But other than that, I use my book as the way to expand the awareness on what I do, because, like I said, there are a lot of misconceptions about personal branding specifically.

My public relations firm is my primary focus. It's my vehicle to other business endeavors and other ventures that I'll be doing over the following days, months, and years in my life. But I use that to create the awareness of my perspective on personal branding and how I view it. It's more of a philosophy, because I go into the idea that personal branding has been around since the beginning of time. Think about Adam and Eve, the story of Adam and Eve. Guess what? Adam had a personal brand. Eve had a personal brand. And that's why I call it a philosophy. So [it's about] showing people the right way and showing people that, hey, this is what it actually is.

It's not just your social media profile. I use it as a lead for my business, number one, for my public relations firm, for my clients. I require my clients to read my manifesto before I even go into the first consultation with them, because if they don't understand the basics, how can I get into the advanced stuff and the strategies, which can become very time consuming?

Isaac Mashman20:10

Well, Mashman Ventures is a public relations firm, and public relations firms basically manage the relationship with the public. That is what the industry is. There are a bunch of different methods, and I say PR is a massive umbrella. You have everything from writing press releases to crisis management. And where Mashman Ventures comes in is we work with people to build out their personal brand, to create, maintain, and scale unrivaled personal brands. That's what we say. So we've had the opportunity of working with executives, musicians, actors, models, and a whole variety of other industries to basically fine-tune their personal brands online, and also share with them strategies that they can leverage offline, such as local networking events or speaking engagements and all of those kinds of things, to build out their personal brand and be able to be perceived as that public figure...

Isaac Mashman21:23

My company website is currently undergoing some maintenance and getting a revamp, but once that...

Isaac Mashman21:35

Here we go. Julian, I just want to say thank you for having me on today.