Building Your Individual Empire: The New Entrepreneurial Shift

0:00Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Business Lunch Podcast with your hosts Ryan Dice and me, Roland Frazier. Ryan, how are you doing today? I'm good. I think we need to be described as the hostess. with the mostases i like that i like that i'm actually going to change to my anti-glare glasses because i see reflections off of the glasses that i have on you are going glassless so obviously you're not going to be reading anything today well because because i my glasses have so much glare so you i can get them without without glare yeah you get as you well know i'm now blind you it just don't need the glasses you just read use the glasses to look smart i know i know yeah i wish yeah i hit 42 and my eyesight just fell off a freaking cliff but fortunately because this is a podcast all i have to do is stare at your beautiful face i don't have to read anything necessarily well hopefully when i hit 42 i won't have that happen to me but um the yeah um so anti-glare lenses and uh anti-reflective frames that's that's the magic so i literally keep a pair up here specifically for that because otherwise it's like, yeah.

1:12So anyway, here's our intro for today. For years, we've told people to build a personal brand. And for months, you followed that advice. And for years, I've followed that advice. But something interesting is kind of happening right now. And it's not really about influence or followers or content calendars, more and more people are quietly trying to turn themselves into businesses, not creators, not consultants, but actual operating companies with revenue and teams and systems, and in some cases, actual value that can be transferred, one of our three pillars of scalable, which is transferable value.

1:50So today, we wanted to talk about what we're starting to think of as the individual empire. So the big question really isn't whether it's possible, because clearly it is. It's whether most people really even understand what they're building when they do that. And is this the most empowering shift in entrepreneurship or is it kind of headed down the wrong path? I'd like to talk about that. Or is it like a new way to just accidentally create a very expensive job? So that's what we're going to unpack today. I wanted to get your initial thoughts on the topic and then we'll dive into some questions.

2:31Yeah, so I think I heard about Mr. Beast considering this, right? Like basically selling rights to essentially like him, right? Who else is looking into this model? And maybe just for context, if you could sort of break down exactly what this new influencer business model is, that might be helpful for the listeners. I mean, really, it's just something that there's a conversation going on about that, that we're moving past building a personal brand that people are actually trying to build businesses around themselves. So what does that mean? I think it means a personal brand. I think that definition can be helpful and let's come to it together.

3:17But I think of a personal brand as basically fame and trust that can be pointed in any direction. And I think of a personal empire as monetizing that trust and fame. Like you've built an audience that you can talk to, that trusts you, and that's a personal brand. but how do you turn that into an actual business? And it's, it's not that it hasn't been done for years because it has, you have, um, um, is it yoga with Emily or something like that? I mean, you have a lot of, uh, of people who basically are their brand and they're, they start with information. They then move into courses and then they move into products and, um, and they do build businesses around themselves.

4:11And we, we, talk about that. You did that long, long, long time ago, initially, I think with digital marketer. So the, the trend though, is that more people are moving from shout outs and affiliates and promoting other people's brands into creating brands around themselves. And probably the most famous one I could think of would be Kylie with her makeup or Fenty with Riri or mostly women, right or um uh kim kardashian and you know and and she has a few now right so that that mr b is doing it with feastables and beast games and some other things like that as well yeah um that's out there i think what's what's different is that that that started with the bigger celebrities and that was you know i i think you're seeing it trickle down into hey all of these people now that are influencers that are broke, because most of them are, are saying, can we build an empire from what we've got instead of just a personal brand?

5:15So yeah, that's kind of how I'm thinking about it. And I love that we're starting with the definition, because I think that's important. And I've always drawn a distinction between media and brands, because they are different. And And typically, media is the thing that aggregates the attention. And it's brands that want to advertise on the media or they want to partner with media to have access to that attention. And so it's funny that we've always used the term personal brand because for the most part, personal brands are actually media. That's what they actually are. And so what we're talking about here really are personal brands, which is why I think the term influencer might be better, influencer media.

6:03What they're deciding to do is they're deciding to launch their own owned brands. And I think that's really wise. I think that's really smart because in and of itself, media is not that great of a business model. That's been shown time and time and time again. Again, if you just go and look over the past couple of decades, one of the poorest performing business models out there has been media across kind of all things. Now, obviously, if you're going to lump, you know, meta into that, then clearly it beats everything. But I don't necessarily consider social media and meta into that. I'm talking about kind of everything but that.

6:43But so I do think that if they're going to say that what they've done is they've created media, they've created an aggregation of attention, then yes, the best way to monetize media is through having your own owned and operated brands. The challenge is that it's a fundamentally different business model. And a lot of these people know the media business. They don't know the brand business. So that's where the rub happens. And that's where you've seen a lot of them make a lot of mistakes. Yeah. So what would you say is the difference between a creator with revenue and what we might call an individual impact?

7:22Well, I mean, you could be a creator with revenue and you are simply you have a YouTube channel and that YouTube channel is monetized through revenue sharing with YouTube. Yeah. Right. I mean, that's I think it's the most basic level. which is generally like if you watch the YouTubers, they're all like, yeah, I don't make anything from that. I make Jack from that. I can have a billion views and make, you know,$8. But what they are doing is a lot of sponsored kind of content, right? And that is your classic traditional media model. I mean, if you go back to, you know, newspapers, radio, magazines, that was kind of their bread and butter.

8:05We're going to run ads, on our channels. That's what they do. And that's what a lot of these creators are doing. That is the simplest, the most obvious, and one of the poorest performing monetization methods. Now, kind of a level up from that is brand partnership deals. And this is where somebody who owns media will go directly to a brand. And as opposed to joint venturing with that brand, I'm sorry, as opposed to doing an advertising deal with that brand, they'll do a joint venture with them. Well, they say, hey, I know for a fact you're making a lot more money by appearing on my, you know, in my advertising, on my social media channel, then you're paying me.

8:50So what do you say we partner together? And I remember we did this a long time ago where we were, we actually did the inverse of this where, yeah, We had an affiliate of ours that we were paying them 50 % commissions. And we realized that this affiliate, which was a newsletter, that they sold advertising. And their ad rates were dramatically less than what we were paying them. We simply closed off the affiliate program and went the ad model and they never even noticed. It was such a large company. And so I think a better way to do it is that. If you know your value and you can negotiate those deals, then doing those kind of joint ventures to the point of eventually getting equity.

9:42That's what you've seen Ryan Reynolds and The Rock and a lot of these other folks do. And then the level up from that is when you're actually launching and creating your owned brands. And that's when you're getting that empire that you're talking about. Yeah. And so a couple of questions around that. At what point would you say that the personal brand stops being an asset and it just becomes a bottleneck? A lot of the people that you talk to that have gone this route talk about running into a wall, that they can only get to a certain point and then they bottleneck out. They can only create so much content.

10:16They can only expand their audience to so much. Where would you say that typically happens? I mean, I think I'd kind of ask you because you've been on this content creation hamster wheel longer than I have. But when you're just one person and you just have 24 hours in a day, you're going to run out. And you're going to run out of steam at some point. You're going to run out of ideas. And it does just get tiring. You know, it does just get old. And I think that's one of the challenges that a lot of these creators have. So if they can't figure out a way to expand their content creation things beyond themselves, then yeah, I think that's when it becomes problematic because the audience is going to constantly demand new.

11:07It's not like a band that can go on tour and just play the same hits over and over again. When you're talking about these different social channels, you got to sing a new song every day. Yeah. And it generally has to be you, you know, can't be AI you, although I've seen AI channels, but they just don't perform like, like, like that. But it seems like it's, you know, you, you have unicorns like Mr. Beast and Kylie and things like that, obviously. But, but I'd say for the average bear, it's in that million to 5 million range is kind of where it caps, which, I mean, if you can, if you can generate that as revenue, and let's say you can operate at a 45, 50 % margin, you know, you can make a lot of money.

11:46So there's a lot of people, I think, that are in that, you know, three, four, five, $600 ,000 a year range that are doing that by themselves. And I think that's the thing, like that that's where the bottleneck happens of where to go. So if you were advising somebody like that, what would you tell them? I think it's more interesting if you own media, then the beautiful thing about media is media can birth brands. But the other thing that media can birth is media can birth other media. And you remember we did this back in the day with Native Commerce, which was our media and e-commerce company. So we had this one business, which was Survival Life, so it was in the survival and preparedness space.

12:39We had a media channel there and we were able to then, leveraging that list and leveraging that media channel, launch a homesteading business because there were a lot of survival and preparedness people who also were homesteaders. So they wanted to live off the land and do more pioneering stuff. Well, the homesteading community happened to have a lot of women in it. And so from the homesteading space, we were able to launch a makeup tutorial site. I mean, if you think about it, we basically had makeup tutorials was two degrees of separation removed from survival, from a survival thing where people were literally teaching people how to safely drink their own urine.

13:16OK, this is what media is able is able to do. So if I'm advising these folks, I would say just like in Hollywood, every actor wants to be a director. Every director wants to be a producer. You got to get on the production side. And so if you're Mr. Beast, I think it's your job to figure out who is the next Mr. Beast. And where you see this, the models are already out there, right? You see this in the music business. You've got to figure out, you've got to create your own label. And so you need to figure out who is the next Mr. Beast in my industry. Who's that person coming up that's got 50, 60, 70 ,000 subscribers, but you see that they've got that thing.

13:57And maybe you can partner with them early on. and cut them in and nurture them up and have them be a part of your greater media network. I think that that's the play and that's where things are going to go. And you've seen some companies do this. Barstool Sports has done this. And I mean, one of the downsides to this model is you're going to build a lot of these people up. And some of these folks, when their contract's over, they're going to spin off and they're going to go out on their own. But that's just a part of the deal. And then your job is really to have good taste. and to be good at identifying that next generation.

14:33And as long as you can do that and build systems and processes around that, then you can have a business. You can have a media business that's sustainable and that's not relying upon just you. You've got the thing launched, but you don't have to be the one staying there forever. What would you say is the thing that people massively underestimate about turning their audience into a real business? Hey, business owners. I've got a quick question for you. Do you feel like you're missing the data you need to make strong business decisions? If so, it's probably time to build a CEO dashboard. It's an easy way to get everyone in your company literally on the same page, focusing on the numbers that matter.

15:12So the Scalable Company put together a free spreadsheet template that will give you everything you need to deploy your own dashboard. And to make it even easier, Ryan Dice recorded a short training on how to use it. If you want to get your hands on the template, go to businesslunchpodcast.com slash dashboard. that's businesslunchpodcast.com slash dashboard and you can download it for free I think people underestimate just how difficult and how long it takes to build a real audience because they confuse views with audience and this is especially true with short form because short form you can have a single video that goes viral and be like oh look I got millions of views and it's like hey what you had was a whole lot of strangers who saw you once and will never see you again.

16:00And so the amount of time that it takes to actually build these parasocial relationships where people have been watching you long enough that they feel like they have this relationship and they want to continue to see you on a regular basis, that just takes time. One of my friends and mentors, Roy H. Williams, I know you know him as well, the Wizard of Ads. He's been preaching for decades that in the radio business, it takes 13 to 15 weeks of a radio campaign. So running a radio ad campaign consistently, at least once somebody's hearing this, at least a couple times a week, the same ad, it takes 13 to 15 weeks to bury that brand message into somebody's brain.

16:55I think the same is true when it comes to building some type of brand and some type of audience online. And I just don't think that people are willing to stick it out that long because it's just hard. So I think that's the hardest part, building the lists. And then, yeah, it also doesn't monetize as quickly or as bigly as you might want it to. Yeah. I mean, I think the whole thing is hard, really. Yeah. I was going to say, what do you think? Because you're doing it. it's all hard. And you do have to build a team. I think that's the big thing is that you're going to cap out really quickly if it's just you.

17:30And it's really hard to find the people. And there's everybody and their brother that's out there offering to do all the things that you need to do, selling you the picks and shovels to dig your gold mine. And most of them are defective. You know, most of them don't know what they're doing there. You know, they also run businesses where they can have one or two clients and then they fill up and then, you know, they give you terrible service. The new client gets the good service. The existing clients get the crappy service. A lot of them have limited playbooks. You know, we know how to do this and then they do that.

18:00And that's how they kind of made their name. But then they do that and there's nothing else. And then that thing ultimately saturates and isn't effective anymore. I mean, I think it's the The content generation, I think, is the easiest part these days to generate great content. If you are good at what you do and you use AI to help you to iterate into your, you know, your things that are working. But all that back end stuff, look at how many teams we've got supporting our personal brand stuff. Right. We have a team that and they were hard fought to find. Right. We've got a team for YouTube. we've got a team for x and linkedin we've got a team for insta and facebook uh we've got a podcast team and what am i missing you know it's it's like and don't even get to email and you know ads and all that kind of stuff it's a lot yeah no you're right i'm gonna amend what i said i think the building of the team is is the hardest part and so much of and we're tiny right like our our I mean, our channels are tiny and simple.

19:07Like we're not trying to get into the millions or anything like that. I mean, we're by and large talking to a relatively small segment of the market. You know, we're talking to seven, eight, nine figure business owners. We don't need to get into the millions for this whole thing to work for us and the people who are, my goodness, you've got to build a team. And at some point, if you want to go big, you've got to build that team internally. It's, yeah, I think you're right. I think that is the team building aspect is the hardest, especially when you consider the number of just absolute chuckleheads in this space, people who will claim to be good at this stuff and they're not.

19:46I think it's higher than just about any other vertical in business right now. Yeah. So would you say Teams is where it falls apart most more than? Yeah. That's why I'm amending what I said before. I think Teams is actually more difficult than even the content consistency in the weighting. 13 to 15 weeks to build a brand. I think so too. And I also think it's longer than 13, 15 weeks. I think that's if you're hitting, like if you're advertising on radio, that makes sense. But if you're trying to get the attention of the world, it takes a long time. I mean, most of them I see it's 18 months plus, you know, to get any kind of traction, you know?

20:23And the curve is like this. It's like, you know, it's very long. And, but once you put it in, you know, it can go, it can go well. The problem is, is that, that people, you know, like my son was talking about starting a podcast the other night and I was like, okay, we got to get 10 in the can. Uh, it's going to come across. Like if you're doing a weekly thing, figure out, you know, how frequently you're going to publish. And if you're doing a weekly thing, I'm telling you those weeks run around and we've been 30 weeks ahead at, at times. And then I feel like, you know, the next day it's like, oh, yeah, we're out of content.

20:54Oh man. That's like, I was just enjoying that, you know, off the hamster wheel for that bit of time, but it, it, you have to really commit to it. It's, it is like a job, you know, when, and the shifting of the channels as well, I think is another painful aspect of it because speaking of podcasts, right? Like what we're doing right now, um, there was a time when podcasts were a really good discovery platform. Like if you put out a podcast, it could somewhat grow organically. That's not really the case anymore. Like it's, it's really, really hard. If you're going to launch a podcast, it is hard to break through right now.

21:30I mean, heck, they just had a podcast award at the most recent, what was it, the Golden Globes or something like that? They gave away an award for podcasts. I mean, podcasts are so mainstream that it's just hard. I mean, the top lists are full. It's sort of like saying, I think I want to launch a show on Netflix if they were wide open. And just the algorithms that are out there aren't as good at serving up the unknowns as YouTube is, for example. So like right now today, YouTube is pretty good at discovery if you have a relatively small channel. So is X right now today. LinkedIn is okay, but a lot of these other channels aren't.

22:10And so figuring out which channels are good for discovery if you're just getting started, those are the ones that you want to get started with. The other ones you may want to wait until you have an audience. The thing is that changes all the time. And so you, not only do you have to get good at content creation, but you also have to stay up to date on which channels are working today and specifically what's working in those channels. It's exhausting. It is hard. It's hard. It's hard. So, you know, speaking from, through the scalable lens, is this model anti-scalable by default or do you think it, it just requires a different architecture?

22:48It's not anti-scalable by default because so much of it can be systemized. We can build systems around this to the point where right now for me, as it relates to scalable and what I do, I've got it down to where I show up, I come into this room, I literally press a few buttons, and I get to talk into a camera for a fixed amount of time and then I'm basically done. And you're still at your house. Now, there's going to come a day when I decide that I don't want to do that anymore and somebody else then will likely need to do that. But it doesn't necessarily have to be me. But I'll tell you this, man, I do think the days of just kind of the nameless, faceless brand, I think they're largely over.

23:41I saw this study that G2 put out, and it said that I think consumer trust is at an all-time low. There's like 100 billion studies that are showing that, and it just keeps going down. The one thing that is impacting consumer trust to the positive, I think 87 % of consumers said that they're more likely to trust a brand. if that brand's leadership and particularly their CEO is active on social channels. So I just think the highest and best, one of the most leveraged things that you can do as a CEO, as a founder of your company is to serve as that company's spokesperson. Yeah, I think you have to.

24:27I think the back office CEO without another spokesperson that's a founder or a trust agent of some sort is, it's gonna be impossible. Yeah. And it's not. You will at some point get disrupted by someone who is doing it. It's just as simple as that. 100%. So you really can't do it now. But would you say if we look down the road five years from now, do you think these individual empires are acquirable? Or do you think they just die with the founder when the founder gets burnt out, tired, dies themselves, whatever? I mean, the analogy that we've used is goose and eggs, right? I think the individual empires are the geese, and I think the brands that they spin off are the eggs.

25:12And I think the eggs are acquirable, but I don't know that the geese are. It's hard. Yeah, I don't know that anybody's necessarily going to buy Mr. Beast. And look, none of this stuff is new. Just look back into the 90s and you have Martha Stewart living. Right? And I would just simply say, like, how'd that work out? That's a bit of a cautionary tale where you have someone who on the, you know, back of her personal brand. And I'm not hating on Martha. We've had the privilege of meeting Martha Stewart and interviewing her. I think she's amazing. I think she's phenomenal. But you're one slip up away.

25:59You're frankly not even have to slip up. like just somebody not liking you away from the entire thing coming down and crumbling. And I think today, a lot of investors just don't want to take that risk. So even if you go out, you're likely not going to get the valuation that you might want. So I think it's going to be brands that have a face of these folks, but the brands need to exist separately from them. I like it. So if we were kind of lightning rounding, would you say valuable, valuable or, or just visible?

26:39The, so the, the specifically like the influencer brand, like Mr. Beast, this idea of the individual empire, right? This, my social media brand. That's a business. I think it's insanely valuable to the person, to the influencer themselves. I don't know that it's transferably valuable. Okay. Beyond the brands that the individual brands that get created from it and spun out. Okay. System first or star first? Right now they're star first. What do you think? I mean, it's an interesting question. I like it because it is star first by definition because it is around the personal brand. But the ones that are just that and no systems, I think, fail.

27:32So if I had to, you know, I think that the successful, if we're looking at success, it's got to be systems first. because if you don't have, I mean, if you can't produce that content on the regular basis and have interesting things to talk about and you're not looking at what other people are doing and what's trending and how do you tie into all that? I mean, it is just coming up with the topic is very systemic, right? You've got to do that. If you don't do that, if it's like, what do you want to talk about today? That ain't going to work, right? No. So I think it has to be - Yeah, you can't rely just on coming up with good ideas at a moment's notice.

28:09Yeah, you're going to run out right um sellable or or untransferable yeah i think that i think the core brand as the as the person and even the holding company i think is can can have challenges yeah i agree um i think that a business that's built around one person uh is terrible but if you look at some of the brands like Poppy, um, or, uh, is it Fuku Moku? I can't think of what the noodle company is, but, um, they were built around an initial success that a single person had. And then, um, somebody who was good at branding took it to the next level. So there was basically, I think one video for Poppy that explained why I forget what it was called before, but it was terrible.

29:00It was like, you know, horrible tasting vinegar or something like that. And somebody was like, let's call it Poppy. Um, but, um, that, that is to me, the way that it works is that, that that video happens to catch fire, millions of people get it. And then people start telling their own stories and the, that drives the product, but it's really, I would say more, uh, like a good, a good one that I didn't come up with for lightning would be, you know, launch pad or continuing business, I think it's a launch pad. And I think that it doesn't sustain the business long term without all the other business machinery coming in.