How Personal Branding Is THE Game Changer for Your Business

0:00Yeah, I think it's phase one. I think phase one, you've got to have a personal brand associated with any product or service that you're launching. I think that was the biggest mistake that we made when we launched Scalable. The Scalable company launched following 2020 COVID. I didn't want to be the face of a brand. You were kind of the face of Epic. And to have you be the face of two brands, that's a bit confusing. And so we launched it with no real face. It was kind of like the company. And it was very, very difficult to gain any kind of traction. now because whose story are you telling who is that who's the person who's advocating for these people what's what's the big why and the big and the greater company purpose like the things that people will rally around behind just the great offer on the front end

0:51hey everybody roland frazier and ryan dice here with another episode of the business lunch podcast ryan how you doing this fine we're recording this on a monday i'm doing astoundingly well we had this like had to host this like massive graduation party for the entire senior class at my son's school and my wife somehow got voluntold that she was helping with it um and if there's something like it yeah and if there's something she hates more than anything it's being responsible for group activities um and so i was gonna think that the thing that she hated the most was being told to do anything she didn't love that yeah she didn't love that but um but it was nice because you and I have experienced planning events, right?

1:30And, and so it's always nice when, when you can utilize some of your business skills to help out somebody that you care about in a non-business related fashion. And so I'm, we're on the other, my wife is happy and I was a good husband. So this is a great day. Excellent. Excellent. Yeah. What about you? Uh, good. I, uh, I have been assembling a music studio, as you know, and I had a big piece that came in and came in about a week ago and I finally got the time to wire it up and then found out that several parts of it weren't working. Some of it was user error, some of it was technical error, but it was working well enough for me to have a really fun time just banging on it for several hours, making it make noise.

2:20So that, that gave me great pleasure and made me feel good. Other than that, uh, it was pretty chill. Played a little. And for listeners who don't know how many, uh, how many keyboards and different, I don't know, equipment of that nature in your collection, what are we up to now? It's not important. Uh, it's not important. I can, I, a lot of them, I'm just holding for a friend and I could certainly quit any time. It's a problem. I can't put on any kind of recording what I have because, uh, I would, I would probably hear about it from a lot of people in my family. But anyway, they would be doing an intervention and selling it all off.

2:58So can't have that. But one thing that I was thinking about, because I was thinking about doing a YouTube channel on music stuff as a separate, just kind of fun thing. I am aware that it's quite a bit of work as I'm starting to plan it. I'm like, you know, I don't know if I want to do it or not. but it made me think a little bit about how important it is to have a personal brand. There was a big event that just happened in the music world. And I was watching several people who built brands as, you know, in the music space. And I was thinking about kind of, you know, how we're doing it and all that stuff.

3:34And I just thought it might be, I think you did a podcast with somebody, an interview you were telling me last week or something, or in the last couple weeks about it. So I thought it would be helpful for people to maybe hear us riff on the personal brand front for a little bit. What do you think about that? Yeah, I love it. I love it. Very strong feelings about this. I think because I think today to launch a brand, to launch a product, launch a service, launch any company without a personal brand associated with it, it's never been harder than ever, like to launch a company without a personal brand associated with it.

4:06I think it's more essential. What do you, because obviously like big companies like Coca-Cola and Ford don't really have the people that are running those companies. Most people don't know who they are. They don't have like big personal brands, at least that you see associated with the brand brand. So what do you like, does everyone, does every business need to have someone with a personal brand behind it? There's always going to be exceptions, but I think the exceptions, you know, more prove the rule than not. I just, it is, yes, you can look at companies that have been around for 40, 50 years and say, well, they don't have a personal brand.

4:50Okay, cool. If you've got a time machine, then my guess is you can build a business without a personal brand too. Just go back in time 40, 50 years ago. So what's different now than that was not different then? I think a couple of things. I think, number one, right now, people are more interested in associating with real people than they are with large brands. We are at a point, at least in Western cultures, where we are anti-institutions. We don't like, you know, nameless, faceless organizations. Pick your political persuasion. They all hate them, right? Everybody hates Congress. You know, everybody hates every governmental industry.

5:27It's like everybody hates every media thing. Just the distrust of large institutions has really, I don't want to say it's never been higher, but it hasn't been as high as it is right now in the past 50 to 100 years. So I think that's thing number one. That's being met at the same time as our marketing channels are so spread out. It's not one of these things where now everybody's tuning in to the same three to five channels every day. And so to break through the noise when the noise is everywhere, I just to do that in a way that goes against people's natural inclinations right now, which is to distrust the nameless faceless organization.

6:07And to do that at a time where you really have to break through an enormous amount of noise. I just think it's that's why it's fundamentally different. Okay. So would you say if people are watching, listening here, and they have a product that's or a service that's already out there in the market and don't have a personal brand, they could benefit from creating one and having that be a component to what they're doing? Yeah, I think it's phase one. I think phase one, you've got to have a personal brand associated with any product or service that you're launching. I think that was the biggest mistake that we made when we launched Scalable.

6:42The Scalable company launched following 2020 COVID. I didn't want to be the face of a brand. You were kind of the face of Epic and to have you be the face of like two brands, like that's a bit confusing. And so we launched it with no real face. It was kind of like the company. And it was very, very difficult to gain any kind of traction. Now, because whose story are you telling? Who is that? Who's the person who's advocating for these people? What's what's the big why and the big and the greater company purpose, like the things that people will rally around behind just the great offer on the front end?

7:20We didn't have that. And it wasn't until, you know, we started doing events and I said, OK, you know, screw it. I got to talk about something. So when I'm up on stage anyway, or you're up on stage anyway, now all of a sudden there's a personal branding component. Once we started taking that out to the market, instantly messaging that didn't work now works because there's a face associated with it. You know, we ran ads for over a year that didn't have my face on them that that performed OK. And the second we swapped out that same copy with me saying it now, all of a sudden, what do you know? the exact same message and the exact same offer dramatically outperformed.

7:57So I do think, and I think it costs us about 18 months, but I do think that today, if you're going to launch it, you got to launch with a personal brand. You or that's why you see so many of these tequila brands, you know, launching with celebrities attached to them, you know? So if not you, there needs to be some type of strategic key person of influence that you're roping into the business. So we used to call it when we were doing infomercials and things like that, a trust agent. that there had to be a trust agent. The trust agent was never the brand. The trust agent was a human that the audience was connected to that would bridge the audience to the product or service using their reputation, basically.

8:41Right. So that's, that's, we're really kind of talking about the same thing, right? Yeah, I think, I think so. I think the difference is, is that consumers today are seeing through just the celebrity endorser. right like do you remember when Matthew McConaughey did those Lincoln commercials yeah you remember like I don't I don't actually know how much that how much that increased like Lincoln sales or anything like that but my my guess is not a ton because one they didn't do it for very long and and two is literally parodied on Saturday Night Live right because I think everybody looks at that and you go okay maybe Matthew McConaughey drives a Lincoln, but is that really the reason that I'm going to buy it because of him, because he's that trust agent?

9:25I think more and more, the trust agent, to use that terminology, needs to be somebody who is involved in the company. They need to be an owner of the company, a founder of the company. I don't know that they need to be the only founder. They don't need to be a majority owner, but there needs to be somebody there who has skin in the game or it's tough to build trust. I think that's what Clooney had going for him with Casamigos was that he told the story of how he and his business partners went around and there were pictures of them on their motorcycles going around in, you know, in Mexico from place to place sourcing agave and tasting and, you know, truly seeking this out.

10:07So there was a story behind it. You can certainly believe that George Clooney drinks that tequila from time to time with whatever else he's drinking. And he's, you know, he's out there taking pictures of him being involved in it. So I think, and that, that made a huge difference. So if somebody is not interested in being in the public light, like let's say that you didn't want to go and put your picture on Scalable and you stuck with that. What would you do instead of that? How would you go about finding that person to be the face of the brand or to be a spokesperson for the brand? You could do it through acquisition of another brand that they've got a great story, but maybe they don't have great marketing or great distribution.

10:55Maybe they don't have the product and service line that you do. And so a merger of some sort or an acquisition of some sort to bring them in, I think, is one option. Another option would be to approach somebody and to bring them on as a founder shareholder. I would make sure if you do that, that it vests, that if there is some kind of, you know, horrible thing where this person turns out, you know, you remember like the Jared subway type thing, if you've got that type of situation, where you can get rid of the person. And if they commit some like, you know, horrific crime, you can get all the equity back, you know, as an aspect of it, or do it as some type of a, you know, phantom equity.

11:35So it's more of a contract and less of a, they're actual on the cap table. um so you know but i mean it's kind of going to be one too you're either going to look to strategic partner co-founder with somebody or you're gonna need to do some acquisition merger i don't really see i don't believe that simply going and paying somebody to be an endorser is enough today i just don't think it's enough yeah what what um about you don't have a company and you're not the face, I mean, you're not the face of a brand or just like you're a normal human being, you're an employee. How does this help somebody like that?

12:21Well, I think what you've got to learn how to do is you've got to learn how to tell a story, your story. So anybody who's running any kind of company, there's a reason that you started that company. There's a reason that you went out and did this. And either you were scratching your itch or you were solving a problem for somebody else. But there's got, there's, there is some origin story behind that. And if you're not good at telling your own story to find somebody, partner with somebody who can help you tell that story is essential. The thing I think people miss, and I know because I miss it, is we don't realize how good some of our own stories are.

12:55You know, I didn't tell, I had not really told publicly the story back in 2016, when we were flying high, three different companies on the, you know, 505 ,000 list, right? I know you remember it well. And from the outside looking in, everybody's like high-fiving us and everything's great and hunky-dory, you know, except, well, spoiler alert, two of those three companies, you know, wound up failing, you know, essentially. And in addition to that, that same year was the year that I basically never made it to any of my kids' soccer games or, you know, piano recitals the same year that I was waking up before anybody was awake, getting home after everybody was already in bed.

13:37And that was the same year that I came home late after midnight one night and had Emily sitting up in bed. And she's like, hey, enough. You keep doing what you're doing, but you can't pretend like you're doing it for us anymore. I had never told that story publicly until one of our events, like the year, like last year. That was the story though, that everybody bonded with and resonated with. Because that was the moment when it's like, okay, we've got to figure out how to actually systemize these things. I can't, we can't just pursue growth at all costs. That's not the thing that's working. It can't all be dependent upon, you know, me as the person who's doing, you know, all of the things.

14:12Like, and that was really what started us on this journey of building the operating system, which was the origin of what became scalable. Now, I never told that story because I didn't think it was that interesting. I mean, it was my story. Wasn't, it was okay. I was like, because I lived it, it didn't seem significant. And so I think sometimes you need an outside perspective of somebody to ask you and to dig for that gold. Because for every single entrepreneur out there, that gold is there. You might have to dig for it, but get somebody to help you find it. So we were talking about how that might benefit somebody that's not an owner of a company.

14:49Oh, sorry. That completely answered the wrong question. That's okay. uh it's good it's good the uh the thing i was trying to kind of get to is that look even if you don't own a company even if you're not going to be the face of a brand for a product or service or a company you as a human should have a personal brand as well and i was reading a couple of stories about the Harvard Business Review did an article not long ago. And I was reading that and it was talking about like a marketing manager. And she had been the head of a significant company, had lots and lots of people that reported to her and had lots of success.

15:33But when she went to find a different job, she was having a really hard time because everybody was like looking at her LinkedIn page. And it's like, well, I mean, those, I guess, were hot, cool things back 20 years ago, but they're not now. And how does that apply to me? Even just like, I think if you say, well, my personal brand is basically what I put out there in the world as to how I am to be perceived. And so I think that thinking about that, it applies to everybody. It applies to you because if you want to get a job, if you want to find a business partner, if you want to, you know, to have any kind of audience, that is really important.

16:23And so being conscious that we all have a personal brand, even if it's not developed, is I think something that's a cool thing to think about. And then that means that if we're not curating our personal brand, then the world is curating it for us or it's just dormant. The world curating it for us could be bad press, what other people say, you know, lots of stuff like that. It could be perceptions of the world curating it for you because LinkedIn is putting out there constantly your out-of-date profile about all the things that you don't know that you haven't kept up on. This person seems like an out-of-date, irrelevant, tired, burnout, you know, marketer that we can't use.

17:12That, like, she wasn't putting that out there. But because she had ignored the brand and she did have a LinkedIn profile, it was nonetheless what was being put out there. So had she taken the time to update that because she had done lots of really cool stuff, she had had lots of successes, she was up on a lot of things, that would change the brand, change the perception, and then increase her ability to have a currency out there that the world would say, yeah, I want to be involved with this person. I want this person on my team. So I liked talking about it because we talked in a couple of episodes about, well, there's the being there for a minute and being missed, and there's the being there all the time and that kind of stuff.

17:58And you guys should go check out those episodes. We'll try to get links in the description. But what I was kind of after here was that we really all have one, whether we realize it or not, a personal brand. And it's our responsibility to decide actively how we want to be perceived and then to curate our presence out there in the world in a way that causes the world to perceive us the way that we would like to be perceived. That's kind of what I was thinking about there. And it's funny, I have a personal kind of anecdote on this because my son, you know, my oldest son, you know, this, he's graduating, he's going off to university next year.

18:40And so he's in that process because he's going to be staying in a dorm of figuring out like, well, who's the roommate going to be? And now, you know, it's not one of these things where you just get randomly assigned. They almost put you in this like dating pool type deal where you kind of, it's sort of like filling out a dating profile where you kind of state your different interests and your level of cleanliness and all this stuff. And then they try to match people to see like if you can decide beforehand to pick your roommate, as opposed to them just assigning at random, which is what it used to be.

19:06That's actually cool because cleanliness and things like that could be a big deal. It's great. But here's the problem. My son is not. he has like all of my shyness and none of my desire to go out there. And so like his social profile and all this stuff, it's either non-existent or he just, because he doesn't like to post, he kind of just looks like a serial killer, right? I mean, it's like, what's wrong with you? And I literally said to him, I was like, you have a social profile. You have a personal brand, whether you realize it or not. But if you're not intentional about it, if you don't post some of these things that make you look fun, then you're just going to look like a freaking weirdo.

19:43Like nobody wants to room with because you look like a freaking weirdo. And so he was kind of like, oh yeah, I guess, you know, you kind of make a point. Like I was like, so for now, just for now, get stuff posted up so that people who go and do their research on you, they can see like, oh yeah, that seems like a nice person. It seems like a cool guy. I know I made this mistake as well. I was like, I don't want to deal with a personal, I got so anti-personal brand. I didn't want, I think I was burned out and just didn't want to, didn't want to build any business that was built around, you know, me or my personal brand.

20:11So I just completely neglected. Which is admirable, right? You don't want to build a business around you because then you can't sell it, right? Bingo. But I've swung the pendulum so far to like, I'm going to let like, you know, weeds and vines grow up around my personal brand. And yeah, you know, you went to my website and that just looked old. I looked like a has-been who hadn't updated his website in a while. LinkedIn referenced stuff I wasn't doing. And, you know, employers, employees, if you're an employer, employees are looking, potential employees are looking at you. Who's the kind of boss and leader I'm going to go work with?

20:44You know, they don't really seem like they got a whole lot going on right now. And definitely if you're an employee, you should know the hiring managers are checking you out on social. So I love what you said there. There is no like, I'm just invisible. You don't get that option anymore. Yeah, you're out there. If you got a profile, you're out there. Yeah. So just kind of bringing that around, I'd say if you have a business, you will, as a spokesperson for the business, help it dramatically if you are putting yourself out there and creating your personal brand and sharing whatever messages you've got about what you're doing, because that will get people who are interested in working with the business to check out the people who are associated with it and then kind of get to know, like, and trust you virtually, which can then benefit the business.

21:36You may develop your own audience, which you can then direct to the business as well. And it's a very symbiotic relationship. It's very mutually beneficial. If you are not associated with a business at that level to where you'd be a spokesperson for it, then sharing something about you that will help people to understand you as the person that you would like to be seen as and understood, that is going to only help you as well. So I think that what you said, like neglecting your presence out there in the world, whether it's on social or otherwise, is probably not the best thing these days. That it is an important component of being a part of society and certainly being part of the working world or even the volunteer world.

22:29I just can't. Everybody looks to social to check you out. you should actually have the virtual you on social be your representative and your ambassador to tell the world about you so that you can do whatever it is that you want to do. And the only exception that I could think of is if you're, you know, if you're on the land, if you're trying to hide from the world and or you just don't care, you know, maybe you're retired and you have no interests and, you know, or you're completely fulfilled. But that's a very, very tiny slice of people that I think would not benefit from this. Even then, go on to LinkedIn or go on to Twitter and be like, you know, not posting.

23:08I'm retired. Enjoy, you know, enjoy the ride, suckers. You know, I mean, like there's ways to signal that as well. Yeah. Without just completely leaving it abandoned. Yeah. So love to hear you guys' thoughts on that. If you have any, it's definitely something that both Ryan and I shied away from. both of us have come around to, it's something that's important to have, and it is very beneficial. And I think that seeing other people that we know and reading case studies out there in the world, it is something that you should be paying attention to. So I would say, and I don't know, do you know any good resources for people that you would recommend?

23:45Or should we just get somebody smart to listen for us in the show notes? I mean, yeah, a buddy of mine, David Perel, wrote an article about coming up with your personal monopoly that I thought was really good because basically your personal brand really should live at the intersection of multiple points of interest. You know, so to say like, oh, I'm a marketing person. Well, great. A lot of people can claim that. So your personal brand is going to generally live at the intersection of two, probably three different things. And so being intentional about those two or three things that you want to put out that make you feel very more of a complete and interesting person is big.

24:19I mean, we talked at the outset, this one, the plan, we talked about your interest in, you know, music and, you know, electric keyboards and that like, and, you know, we're both interested in wine and travel. And, you know, these are all things that add additional layers that you want to put on, put out there as well. And so, yeah, David Perel, his art, if you just Google David Perel, personal monopoly, he actually came out and spoke to our founders board members last month. And so if you're listening to this and your founders board member, his, his session is in, is in the portal. And I'll also say, if you're an entrepreneur, it is critical that your personal brand be there to launch it.

24:52But I would still, and you've seen us do this, the name of the company probably isn't your personal brand. Because at some point you do want to transition to where you're less the face, you're more the spokesperson, and ultimately you invite others in. And that is how you do eventually build the Coke and the Apple that doesn't require you. So I think it's essential in the beginning. I think it's less essential as brands build on and create their own brand equity separate from the founder, separate from the key person of influencer, spoke person, trust agent, whatever you want to call it, but make sure that you, that you engineer the brand architecture in such a way that it's not your name as the name of the company.

25:30Just throw that out there. Awesome. Well, I hope you guys enjoyed it. If you did enjoy it, please share it with other people who you think might benefit from it. And we will see you next time on the next episode of business.

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