The Importance Of Your Personal Brand

0:00The second somebody gets out their wallet, second somebody gets out their credit card, there is a fundamental relationship shift that has taken place. They're no longer just a fan. They're no longer just a consumer of content. They're now a customer. They're now a client. And that shift is really important. How much more successful would you be if you had lunch once a week with insanely successful entrepreneurs who share their biggest secrets on how they think and achieve success? Grab your seat at the table because this is Business Lunch with Roland Frazier and Ryan Dice.

0:35Welcome to another episode of Business Lunch. And today's a snackable episode with Roland where he's going to get into some more tactical strategies that you can start using to live a rich and happy life. If this is the first snackable episode you're hearing, I'd encourage you to go back and listen to some of the other episodes that Roland has put out. And if you want to get notified every time we release a new episode, go to the new businesslunchpodcast.com website and we'll send you detailed notes along with every episode. That's businesslunchpodcast.com, www.businesslunchpodcast.com. and you can sign up for the free email newsletter where you'll be able to get all the highlights and resources from the episodes.

1:11Hey everybody, Roland Frazier and Ryan Dice with another episode of the Business Lunch Podcast where we are going to follow up on the conversation we had about the book launch of my book with Jay Abraham, Business Wealth Without Risk, which happened recently. We broke down everything on the last podcast. This one, we are going to talk about how Ryan is approaching the launch of Get Scalable And funnily enough, neither Business Wealth Without Risk nor Get Scalable, which is Ryan's book, was written by us together, despite the fact that we all talk about all of these things all the time. And we talked about why last time.

1:47We'll talk about why on this one as well and then break down kind of what you're doing. So, Ryan, why the heck didn't I get to write this book with you? Yeah, it's because you add no value and I'm just not, I just don't care for you very much. I get that a lot. That makes sense. At all. That's acceptable. Yeah, at all. No, I mean, in this particular case, a lot of this is trying to do things simultaneously rather than sequentially. Yeah. You know, right. And so it is one of those it is one of those pieces where it's like, OK, you're going to work on you're going to work on this book that you're doing with Jay.

2:20I'm going to work on this book that I'm doing, you know, that I'm doing over here. And let's get these both done at the, you know, on around the same time. Whereas I think if we tried to write a book together, we both would have been very kind of precious with it. We both would have taken a long time. My delays would have been at different times than your delays. And my guess is by this point, we would have had zero books, whereas right now we have two. Which is cool because we actually have been trying to write a book for I don't know how many years now that is both of us that is kind of semi done.

2:54but actually during the time that we just talked about this last week, the, during the time that we've been writing it, we kind of decided to do everything differently. And so all of the effort and expense that went into writing that one, it's kind of just not going to ever be released. And, um, and I mentioned last time I wrote with Jay to get access to other markets, but also you guys, when you're in partnership with people, you don't have to do everything together. Ryan, this was, if not exclusively, primarily all of Ryan's thoughts and ideas about business operating system. And he may bounce things off of me, just like he does thousands of other people, but it's really his work.

3:34And so it makes sense when it's your work for it to be just you don't slap your name on it, unless there's extra value to be gotten from it. And also beware trying to write one together when you both have busy schedules, and you have one that just doesn't ever come out. Okay. Yeah. And, and, and, you know, in the same way that I didn't care to, because it would have been easy enough. I'm sure I've been like, if I bet if I had thrown a little pity party and be like, I want to be in a book with you and Jay that, you know, you would have like, let me write a bonus chapter or something like that. And I could have put my name on it as well.

4:05But as we talked about, we're not in this for the fame. We want the deal flow. And so I get to participate on the deal flow that comes through that book because we're business partners in the same way that you'll be participating on the deal flow. that comes from this. So I think it's so important. And especially this is not the topic of today's episode, but it is so important, especially in business partnerships, that you are clear on what is the goal that everybody's looking to achieve. And you just let ego just sit over there by itself and be the little, you know, toddler crybaby that it is.

4:40Because I think had we done that - wrote a whole book on that called Ego is the Enemy. There you go. Yes. And so I just, it's, I mean, I think the point, and we've said this, when we try to write a book together, it still isn't done. We said, let's go ahead and get these books knocked out separately, both get done. Yeah. Magic, right? And so, yeah, so I think that's the most important thing. And then we get to benefit from them, not just in the awareness that it creates for our respective brands that all again funnel that kind of is that high tide that rises our collective ships. Not only do we get to benefit from the deal flow that it creates, but we also get to benefit from the idea sharing, which is what now everybody else gets to listen to.

5:25Because in the previous episode, you broke down your philosophy and your strategy for how you wanted to do the business wealth without risk book launch. And it's obviously worked, right? I mean, there's no doubt that that worked. And we talked about in the previous episode, you know, are there some things you wish you'd done differently from a scheduling perspective? Sure. But the strategy worked. Yeah. So let's talk about here, why this book? What is the objective of the book? Because I think that's always the place to start. What did you want from doing it? Yeah, so the objective to this book, you know, for this book is, so if we're going to talk about from a pure business perspective to generate leads for Scalables flagship services, we're at the Scalable company.

6:12We help entrepreneurs, small business owners, systemize, operationalize, install an operating system in their business so their business can scale without them. Now, why do we want to do that? Why do we want to help businesses install operating systems so their business can scale without them? Because then their businesses are more sellable, and perhaps we can be a part of the scaling and the selling slash exiting of that business. So everything that we do is in service of deal flow, is in service of the investing private equity side of the game. But this is first and foremost to generate those kinds of leads, which is a different reader than the folks that you were targeting with the book with Jay.

6:55We're really targeting with this book people who are in that$2 million to, let's say,$12 million is kind of a sweet spot revenue range. and maybe their profits are super constrained, maybe even non-existent at this point in time. And they're in that gross, messy middle of a swamp of scale. We want to target those folks so that we can help them scale in showing value, maybe get to work together when they're on this, you know, hopefully on the other side or close to the other side of the swamp of scale. I like it. So the end result is deal flow, but there's a few steps in between. I want to talk about something because there are other people that have a model of, well, if you're looking for deal flow, why don't you just give away all this stuff for free?

7:48And then let the deal flow come from it. And the deal flow will, you'll reach way more people that way. And therefore you'll have greater deal flow. And ultimately, if you're truly looking for deals, then that's the way to do it. Why do we choose not to do it that way? Because the way that humans show commitment is in their calendars and in their wallets. I mean, and so the idea that somebody is going to commit, be committed enough to want to bring you in as a business partner or as an investor, that's a big commit. I mean, that's as close in the business world as you can get to marriage. And so to do that, there needs to be some micro commitments along the way.

8:33And if you give everything away for free, then you're going to get micro commitments from the people who do actually spend an enormous amount of time to consume that content. The challenge that we found is that a lot of times the people who are willing to spend a lot of time to consume the content are your DIY folks. These are not the people who are necessarily going to want to bring you in. These are the people who are going to want to try to figure it out so they can do it themselves. And God love them. I fall in that camp a lot of times, not most of the time, but enough. I can appreciate it.

9:04But they're the ones that were less likely. The folks, though, the simplest way to get somebody to make a commitment is to get them to make a small investment. And we've seen this time and time and time again. And it doesn't have to be much. Somebody can invest just a few bucks. But the second somebody gets out their wallet, second somebody gets out their credit card, there is a fundamental relationship shift that has taken place. They're no longer just a fan. They're no longer just a consumer of content. They're now a customer. They're now a client. And that shift is really important. And that shift now begins a relationship where they can make ever-increasing investments to where now, I mean, we have people that we've been working with who we've, who have been giving us through consulting, uh, through masterminds, through the advisory services that we've offered them.

9:56They may have given us hundreds of thousands of dollars over a period of years and have been thrilled to do it. And so then one day to say, you know, Hey, what if we were just to be business partners? That's a tiny little leap. Then, you know, I read your book. I watch your YouTube video. I've been following you on TikTok by my company. I'm not saying that it can't work. We obviously have a good friend who that is his whole entire model. But if you're going to go that route, boy, you've got to be doing a massive scale. I mean, you have to be so wide, cast such a broad net for the law of large numbers to kind of work out for you.

10:32That just becomes a business unto itself almost. It does. And I think it is a business into itself for us as well. But to me, you can eat your cake and have it too, because all the things that you said help all of that experience of having an actual business relationship really lets you see a lot more about somebody to know if you want to be in business with them in the first place. But let's say that that's a BS reason. Let's say that it's not. I know it's not. And I know you know it's not. Let's disregard everything else and just say it is also possible to build multiple eight-figure businesses, adding tremendous value to people, getting them to act more intentionally and consistently on the value that you're given because it's not given away for free because free typically is valued at nothing or less by people.

11:25It's valued at the price people pay. Right? Who don't pay for it. And we also have the opportunity to create eight figure businesses plus in the process. So, you know, to me, it's kind of like we get to monetize all along the way and effectively get paid to source deals. We know that very few deals that we actually want to do will come through the machine. We don't want to have a big deal vetting machine that we build as much as we want to just have the people that we've had a chance to have some business experience with before we get to the point of maybe possibly working with them. And so it's just a different business model, but I really like it because we're building income and wealth while finding the people that we want to build income and wealth together with.

12:14And I really like that. While getting paid to do due diligence. Yeah. And you also find out who's actually going to implement, who's going to take your advice. Who's a good business partner. Yeah. Who's going to be a good business partner. I think a lot of it comes down to, um, there was a time when offering courses, offering coaching, offering consulting, offering masterminds was seen as a show of lesser value because it was largely done by hucksters, gypsies, tramps, and thieves. I mean, let's just call it what it is. Some of the early people who were out there slaying in courses, um, they didn't always have the best intentions.

12:47They weren't always the most professional. Let's be honest. A lot of them weren't real business people. A lot of those folks who were selling courses had only ever made any money teaching other people selling courses on how to teach people how to sell courses, selling courses. And it became this kind of gross, incestuous sort of thing. And so that became the brand around it. Post 2020, when cohort based courses and, you know, we're in a world where LinkedIn Learning is now, gosh, 20, almost 20 years old. You know, Udemy is a$750 million publicly traded company. Coursera is a billion dollar company.

13:20There's an acceptance of at home training. You don't have the same stigma around Coursales to where it's going to be, it's going to hurt your brand. It might with some, but not with most to where the benefits would outweigh it. And that's definitely not the case with, you know, now consulting and doing some type of coaching services. Some of the largest companies in the world are consulting and service based companies. So, but I do believe that there are some people who bring a legacy stigma to it. That's why they don't want to do it. I just think it's, you know, I think it's their own head junk.

13:58We haven't seen it in practice. We have not. So, okay, let's get to the book. So we know now you want to do it to help build awareness and sell the operating system and also ultimately generate deal flow. What is the book launch thesis and process? Yeah, I should say that's the primary. Secondary is also a brand play. And so both in terms of wanting to carve out a little bit of space in the operating system world. I mean, currently, the number one, like the de facto leader, if you're going to talk about a business operating system, is EOS, is Traction. You know, our buddy, Gino Wickman. And so - Who wrote the preface to our book.

14:42Yeah. And I think this is important. You know, is that a competing book and a competing concept? Sure. Will people buy both books? Absolutely. Will some people prefer his, you know, the EOS to the scalable operating system? Yep. Will others prefer both? Sure. Like, so we don't have a scarcity mindedness around this at all. That being said, we need to make it known to the world, hey, there's another operating system for, you know, framework out there. And so if you tried this one and it didn't work for you, maybe this will. well. And it doesn't mean that they're bad or stupid or dumb, or we don't like them.

15:16Look at both and see which is the best fit, right? Bingo. And so, you know, so we, so a lot of it is carving out a space in the business operating system world. But also the decision to call it get scalable. Look, that is not the sexiest title in the world. You know, business wealth without risk. I know how to write a headline. You know, I can write some copy. Business wealth without risk is a heck of a lot better headline than get scalable. So why do we have get scalable? Because there is a sense there where we want to establish scalable as a brand. We have get scalable, the event. So get scalable live, the get scalable accelerators, the flagship program.

15:56So a lot of this is also beginning to build some brand around the scalable terminology. And we're willing to sacrifice a little, you know, maybe some conversion rate on the front end to people who don't know us to begin to own the word scalable. Like that is one of our goals. We want in the same at digitalmarketer.com, we wanted to own digital marketing. We wanted to own the term. We really want to own the term scalable, not necessarily scale, but scale able. So that's a very kind of, you know, strategic intent around the titling of it. And then the subtitle, you know, the operating system, your business needs to run without you.

16:32We've got operating system in there, that connection works. So I just wanted to say from a goal perspective, that's the reason. um so do you want to get into the you asked about the launch you want to get into that what what's what's the plan so what's the goal of the launch like let's say there's a launch period what is the period and what is the goal so the goal is actually not to launch and i think that this is an important and it's an intentional um it's an intentional strategy shift that i i want to try because I've got a hypothesis and I think it'll work. We'll see. And again, this is the benefit to us doing two different things and trying stuff out.

17:11It's a benefit to listen to the, you know, business launch podcast. You get, we'll get to reflect back and see in a year if this worked or not. But when, when I analyzed all of the bestselling books that have been kind of that perennial bestseller, like they've stayed on the top of the charts. When I went back and looked, pretty much none of them had a launch in the way that we launch books now. Now you could say they didn't know and had they done it, it would have worked even better. Correlation is not equal causation. I submit. But when I thought about these books, they got where they got because they just were always there.

17:51It was just almost like that itch, like that little hum in the background that you couldn't get rid of. Yeah. I think it's, it's word of mouth primarily. Like if you write a good book and market it consistently and it's great, then the word of mouth is what causes it to catch fire. And I know, um, Ken Blanchard launched the one minute manager after he'd sold, I want to say two or 300 ,000 copies of it, uh, because it was a great little, fable type book. Right. But well, actually that was who, who moved my cheese, I guess that the one minute manager was a great little, just, I mean, I read the first one in the bookstore, right.

18:31I was in the bookstore and I was like, I read the whole book. Oh, wow. You know, but I was like, that was really good. So I still bought it and I still recommended it to lots of people. But he got published after having sold a ton of copies of the book. I was talking to Jay the other day, Stephen Covey with the seven habits, that book was out there for over a year before it really caught on. And, um, and I think that's, that's what happened. So I think what you're saying has a whole lot of merit. It's, you're going to miss the big awareness push to hopefully kind of kickstart the word of mouth, but ultimately the quality of the book is what's going to keep it up there.

19:09And it's going to be word of mouth. I think more than any campaign or promo. And that's the entire strategy is how do you engineer word of mouth referability? And so the whole goal of the book is not to write a book that gets bought. It's not to write a book that gets read. It's to write a book that gets referred. And so that's why if somebody's thinking in terms of operating system, or if somebody mentions, you know, attraction is, oh, you should read this one too. And so that's kind of the category that I want it to occupy. But I think if it went out there in a launch, it would have a splash and people would talk about it.

19:47But you know, we got a mutual friend, Alex Formosi, he did this massive book launch, sold up to hundreds of thousands of copies of this book. But kind of everybody talks about it, screams about it. And then to continue talking about it two weeks later, you almost feel weird. It's like, yeah, I know about it. Everybody's heard about it. So to continue to talk about the thing that everybody already knows about now, referring that book, talking about that book is actually a show of lesser value. I get a reduction in status. If I talk about something that everybody knows about, but if I know something that you maybe don't know, I'm incentivized to tell you.

20:26So if I, if I ask you right now, um, what are three books, like the top three books you would recommend to me for business? What would you say? The top three books for, uh, for business at large. Um, I mean, yeah, traction would be one of them, uh, that, that would get recommended a lot. Um, probably like, you know, good to great. Um, I mean, there's other ones that I like that, that aren't as recommended as often, but like, if so, if somebody asks you that question, do you recommend what you just said, or do you recommend those that not a lot of people have heard of. No, yeah. I recommend art of profitability, which nobody's talked about.

21:06I recommend the goal, which people heard about 20 years ago, but now nobody has. Yeah. I'm going to, I'm going to recommend the obscure ones that you haven't heard about. Yeah. So that's, that's smart. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And same here. You do a podcast interview and people, everybody and their brother is going to say, Oh, think and grow rich and how to win friends and influence people. You know, like, okay, great. You know, everybody has already heard that, what can you add additional value? What's the one that I keep in my pocket that I, you know, kind of, I want to tell you about, but I also don't want to tell you about, you know, so for me, it's like black box thinking is like that.

21:41The goal is like that. There's, there's those books that, that you read and have huge breakthroughs as a result of reading. And then you want to share those and you also want to be different. So I like your strategy from, okay, what's the book that not everybody's heard about? That's the under the radar that's this one. That's get scalable, man. That I read that. It changed my whole operating system. Yeah. Don't, don't, I mean, read that one too, but man, you got to read this one. Yeah. So the entire strategy is built around engineering referability. Yeah. Um, and so the idea is don't launch, don't make a big splash, let it be everybody's dirty little secret.

22:19Um, but my, but the, the way that I'm looking to do this is I want to do a hundred podcast interviews over a hundred days. Now some of them will drop at the same time. I'd like to have about 30 of those happen during pre-launch and have the other 60 happen and then never stop promoting it. You know, for at least I'm seeing this launch as being 15 months. Okay. So you got a hundred podcasts. That's a hundred hours, let's call it of your time directly. What period of time are you going to do the hundred podcasts over? That'll happen over about a six month period. Oh, okay. Okay. So it's not, I was like, man, that sounds awful.

23:01You're going to spend. Yeah. Some of them. So some of them have already happened, but I'm telling people don't release it until here. Got it. Okay, good. Right. And so engineering, which ones are going to drop during, um, you know, which ones are going to drop during pre-launch. Yeah. Which ones are going to go there and trying to coordinate that and look same like affiliates. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't. But the nice thing about podcasts is people want to interview you. And if you got a book, like they're, they're happy to do it. So I didn't have to beg people. Hey, will you mail my book?

23:31It's just, you know, people ask me all the time. Can I, you know, can you come on my podcast? Yep. But I'm not going to talk about marketing. I'm going to talk about this and you can't release the podcast until these dates. Is that okay? Yeah. Yep. So that's the whole thing there. It is the non-launch launch. It is like, let's have it be the thing that, because when I think about the books that really took off, that's what happened. I remember when you looked really, really, really cool, because we knew about the four hour work week and nobody else did. Because what was Tim Ferriss doing back then?

24:06Tim Ferriss was doing hundreds of interviews with anybody who could do an interview with him. Yeah. And I just haven't seen anybody go and execute that. And when I think about the pressure of a launch week, it's make or break. I mean, you know, you said it in the previous podcast that we did, previous episode, you know, you had to make it work because it was launch week. And it didn't matter that you had 15 events that same week, you know, and that you hadn't slept. And then you had like you had to make it work because by God, that was launch week. And there's something really powerful and magical about that that I wouldn't discount.

24:40It's a beautiful forcing function to get people to mail. And it may turn out that this doesn't work at all. But if it doesn't work, it will not have worked because the book just didn't hold up. Yeah. Right. It'll just be that the book wasn't good enough to be referable. If that's the case, it'll obviously be disappointing. But I feel like that's something I can control. That's what worked so hard to make sure that it was an amazing book. To make sure that there's rules. Is there any other strategy or device that you're using or tactic to get referrals for the book? So I heard about it on the podcast.

25:20I bought it. Now what? we're going to do um advertising in amazon for the books that we want to sell up against i'm calling inside the book to encourage people to refer we don't have anything inside the book to encourage people to refer in retrospect that would have been smart um but we we didn't we can we can build some of those elements for new one that's what second printings are for yeah exactly yeah we can do another print run for sure. I'm just wondering, like, if you, if you had the ability to like, you could just use one of those like referral candy or something like that and say, listen, here are benefits.