The Strength Of A Personal Brand

0:00If we're going to accept, and I do believe it's true. if you're an entrepreneur, one of the most valuable things you can do for yourself and for your business today, but for future businesses later on is to have a personal founder brand, like to build your own audience and to build your own following that can be directed at the business. The business also builds its own. Yeah, you get both. How much more successful would you be if you had lunch once a week with insanely successful entrepreneurs who shared 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.

0:41Welcome 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.

1:15Hey, everybody. Welcome to Business Lunch with Ryan Dice, who is on your screen and the person whose lips are not moving right now, and me, Roland Frazier. And if you're listening to this, you don't even know who's who, but I'm me and he's him. Ryan, how are you doing today? I'm doing really great. I don't know how to come back from that. That was amazing. That's a beautiful introduction. I'm excited to be here with you. What the heck are we talking about? Well, actually we were chatting about the possibility of, well, actually we were talking about personal brands for founders and entrepreneurs.

1:48And I love the topic. What are your thoughts on that? So I've evolved on this issue, as they say. I push back so hard on this topic for so many years. I was a personal, and I guess still am, had a personal brand on the internet, very well known through Digital Marketer and Traffic and Conversion Summit, and I never liked it. I truly believe there are some people who want to be famous, and there are some people who want to be rich, and there are some people who want both. I'm only in this for the money. I will say that. Um, I am not in this for any degree of fame. I don't particularly enjoy it.

2:25It's not my favorite thing. Um, and so I always saw, I want to, I want to correct before you guys think that Ryan is an evil money grubbing genius. Um, he does also, you like to give back, you like to share and you like to teach, right? So that I do. So like that component of what you do, you enjoy quite a bit. Um, but the fame you could do without. Yes. Yes. Yeah. That saying I'm only in it for the money is hyperbole. But yes, I think, thank you. But I always saw it as a necessary evil and something that I would do only as long as I had to. And I remember it had to have been at least going on 10 years now.

3:04I was having, I had dinner, just me and him with Gary Vaynerchuk. I was up in New York and we were grabbing dinner, kind of circumstances aligned, just the two of us. And we were talking about this whole thing. And I was like, man, why do you do it? because it seemed like it sucks and he basically was like i love it i was like okay i get why you do it and he's like and i was like i don't and i'm you know i'm trying to figure out how to not and he told me he said he said i think that's really stupid um and he actually said i think that's effing stupid if you know gary he's like i think it's effing stupid like uh you shouldn't do it's like really like yeah yeah he's like i will i will always have it uh i think it's important i think you're doing it anyway and i think if you if you ever stop you're going to regret it And like any arrogant idiot, I promptly listened to that advice, said thank you, and ignored it.

3:51And it's because, for me, when I thought about the notion of a personal brand, I thought this is something that is unsellable. This is something that keeps you trapped. this is something that only those people who have to do it do and the actual you know people with real wealth who have built real companies and real brands they don't have to mess with doing this unless they just want to and that's because they want fame and i don't and i and i think i i approached it from a from a very arrogant egotistical point of view like oh i don't have to do that and and so i'm not going to do that what i have come to realize and i've come to evolve on this issue is that Gary was right and I was completely stupid.

4:35And I'm now in the process of looking to kind of actively rebuild and relaunch a personal brand at the similar time where I'd love for you to speak to this because you definitely enjoyed being the man behind the scenes, you know, being the person that nobody really knew who they were. And you would come out and you do some talks. Everybody's like, who is that masked man? And then you go back behind, you know, the thing it's like, ah, you'll never see him again. Ha ha. But, um, But obviously, over the last couple of years, you've really made an effort. This podcast notwithstanding, your social following, books and whatnot, to build up your own personal brand.

5:13So I feel like we were sort of aligned. And then without talking to me, you sort of like decided that you were going to go and build this personal brand. And, you know, you making that decision definitely was one of the things that helped me evolve. So I'm just curious, like, I'm happy to speak to what I feel about it now. I want to give the context to where I was. But where do you stand on this? Yeah. So I'm same same place that that you stood and same evolution is I always I liked being the person behind the scenes. I like you. I like the rich part. Don't care about the fame part. I also like to teach and impact.

5:49But I had found that you could do that from behind the scenes just fine. Um, but what I saw was I saw a lot of, um, a lot of people leveraging audiences into deals and because I'm a deal person and, and that's near and dear to my heart. And also I was watching people that were way, way younger than me, uh, hitting the billion dollar mark, um, in shockingly fast time. And they didn't do it. Some of them had sex tapes. And to my knowledge, you don't. To your knowledge. Yeah. Yes. No, I don't. But the the thing is, is that that what I what I watched him doing was that that I saw that that it was audience.

6:35And I first saw it with like, OK, well, they're billionaires because they've invented some amazing thing and I'm not going to invent Facebook, which still pisses me off just to be clear that I did not do that. I didn't. And and so I was mad about that, but I was OK with it because I'm like, you know, well, that's a unicorn hacker, crazy, you know, Harvard, you know, there's got to be some Van Winkle losses and some other people in there, but, um, that's okay. I can live with myself. But then I watch, um, significantly younger people hitting this and they're doing it through this whole being an influencer thing, which I'm like, just think is the most ridiculous thing ever that people are famous for being famous.

7:17And so I, I just, I didn't understand it. Um, but I truly didn't get the value of it that Gary clearly got way before you or I did. And, um, and what I saw was that, that if I was that, that like part of what I didn't like about it too, was creating content, but that if I wanted to get to where I wanted to get, I needed to not be just in deals. I needed to get deals and to have the best deal flow I could advertise, uh, or I could create content that was interesting to people. And honestly, between those two, I way prefer creating content. Um, I didn't like the idea that you create content and then it's very ephemeral.

8:03It goes away and then nobody sees it again. Um, but what doesn't go away is the audience that you're building. And so that, that you're, the asset isn't your content base. The asset is the audience and the audience is very monetizable and you have a responsibility to them to do that in a fair and good way and give them value. And when you do, they will reward you. Now, when you command an audience, even if it's a small one like you and I have, it's still quite valuable. And there are people that would like to have access to it and they will then do deals with you. And so without being Kylie Jenner or George Clooney or The Rock or all these other people that you see doing deals with companies because they have an audience, you can still effectively get that same benefit because there will be people who want to have access to the audience that you have.

8:56And if you're building and growing that audience, that will only increase with time. And as long as you treat that audience well, that asset will be there and grow and grow and grow. And so even though you're doing different deals and even though your content is short-lived and goes away very often, then you still are building that asset. And it took me a really long time to get that. It seems to me incredibly simple at this point, but I'm a slow learner, I guess, or just, you know, I didn't want to do it. But having realized that if I was going to get what I wanted to get within the time I wanted to get, I was going to have to build an audience.

9:37And at that point, it was, OK, I'm leaning in all the way. And then it's been a crazy four year journey or so, I guess, at this point of of how do I do this? because holy goodness, it's a lot of work to, even for us doing this podcast, it's a lot of work to do something consistently once a week for years, but that's really what it takes to make it happen. So like I was completely on the same page with you and then just saw that I am not less smart or less good or less valuable than the people that I see monetizing their personal brand into the things that I would like to do. And so I've got to have, I've got to do those things too.

10:26That's kind of the evolution. So where are you, any comments on that? And then where are you now? So I think the biggest breakthrough for me happened, and maybe this is going to be beneficial for other people who feel like we both did. There's a difference between saying I have, let's call it a personal brand for lack of a for lack of a better term and i have a business where i am the product yeah agree and i think i think i struggled separating those two in my own head yeah right and and so i'll i'll say it another way if if your company is is you right and and this could be maybe you've got a guru business yeah right you look at somebody like a tony robbins where they are their business and their business is them.

11:12If there's no Tony on stage, there's probably nobody coming out to that event. And there's lots of people that are like this where they are their business and their business is them. And there's lots of people where that's the only business they have. And there have been these people, this is nothing new. They have lived, they have died and their business has died with them. And I never wanted that. And so I was very intentional when we were building digitalmarketer.com. Even though I was the early face of the company, even though I was a like to think a pretty good marketer in my own right I never wanted digital marketer to be the Ryan Dice guru business yeah so I actively tried to bring on other people but I thought that I then as a personal brand almost needed to die to not do that not the case but I think by the way you may say like yeah but I'm not Tony Robbins I don't have a guru business this same thing happens in professional services um all the time with you know attorneys and folks where they are the business and the business is them.

12:08And so I always conflated, if I have a personal business, I'm sorry, if I have a personal brand, then I'm trapped and it can never be sold. But that's not the model, right? If you have a personal brand, sure, it's a business, but it is a media company with the most efficient type of media that has ever existed, which is fame. I mean, fame is the most efficient type of media there is. You are producing, it is this like self-generating perpetual motion media machine. And it can be pointed wherever you want to point it. It is a spotlight to be shined upon other businesses. And I think if you look at, like you said, George Clooney, if you look at Ryan Reynolds, if you look at The Rock, These are people who definitely have their own personal media brands, but where they build value, where they build equity, where they've had their biggest successes is not with them as the quote unquote media company.

13:07It's with the brands. And so when I realized that, OK, I don't have to be a guru and I don't have to attach myself to this business. And tactically speaking, I think the biggest realization that I had was I can have an email list. that isn't associated with one of my companies. Like people could just subscribe to hear from me. I never actually thought about that before. I know that sounds ridiculous. I can launch a YouTube channel where I'm not just creating content for one of our companies. Like I could have my own. Again, that thought never really, and I know even saying it out loud, this sounds stupid and I realize that, but I also don't think I'm the only one who's making this logical fallacy.

13:55And so just the realization like, oh, wait, and this is what Gary was telling me, you can have both. You can have both. And if you decide to sell a company, the company sells. And if you decide one day to retire from media and fame, you can do that. You'll still own your business or you won't because you sold them. But you can have both. And I think that was the realization of the breakthrough that I know that I had. And that now I'm stepping out to make that happen. So I would love to maybe shift. Anything else you want to say on that is cool. What I would love to hear from you is if we're going to accept, and I do believe it's true, if you're an entrepreneur, one of the most valuable things you can do for yourself and for your business today, but for future businesses later on, is to have a personal founder brand, like to build your own audience and to build your own following that can be directed at the business.

14:44The business also builds its own. Yeah, you get both. You get both. So we're going to say that, like, let's just acknowledge that it's a good idea. My question to you would be, what are the things that you believe need to be in place? What are the assets, the channels that you think you should tap into as a founder? And maybe is there a sequence to these things? What do you think? Yeah, I think it's a great question. And I think the other thing that you and I both didn't and continue to not like about personal brand building is that when you stop with the content, it pretty quickly goes away. Like if you're not top of mind, there's a lot of other people that want to be top of mind that will immediately fill the void of the content that you're no longer making in the lives of all the people that are following you and you will fade fast.

15:37that's true of very famous people and it's definitely true of people like us. That's Hollywood. That's the show business, baby. Yeah, it really is. So it's what can you get out of it while you're doing it? So you have to understand that. In terms of the sequence or the things, I think the very first thing is you have to have some experience that you have had or experience that you can create for the audience that is different from what other people do to have any kind of significant impact. And a lot of people, it's like when I used to go to investment advisors and you're having conversation with them and it's, you know, a guy that's, you know, 21 years old or a gal that's, you know, uh, just gotten out of her MBA program and they're going to tell you how to invest your money.

16:31And I'm like, but what do you, how's your net worth looking? You know, like, oh, well, I'm just getting started. Okay. So you want me to give you a whole bunch of money to manage because you work for the guy. Okay. No, I don't like it. Um, yes, dummy. That's how I build my net worth. Right. Yeah. From the mistakes. Yes. Yeah. So, um, so, so that's a challenge. Like if you're, if you don't have experience and success and a proven track record in something or cannot create a unique and entertaining experience for people, then I probably would think about getting that in place before you start, because you can say, well, Mr.

17:10Beast, you know, he didn't have any experience going in, but he did. He just started making videos and he really made it a study. And then he created a little mastermind with some other people that were making videos and they shared all their learnings. And he creates very unique experiences that even though he might not have been a seasoned business person as he was doing this, he captured the attention of the audience. And then you get people that that do have business experience that can go and maybe they do a Ted talk or something like that. And they find that that resonates people with people and they're sharing that experience.

17:45And then people want to have, I think, um, who's the guy, uh, Simon Sinek, right. You know, it's, he's famous because he came up with a really unique way at looking at something that was pretty common. It was, you know, find your why was not revolutionary, but making that you're, you know, tying your brand to that and that experience that he was able to create for people, I think that was significant. So one of those to me is the starting point then having that, or just don't try to talk about something you don't know anything about that you don't have experience in. Don't sell other people's experience that you're curating unless you decide you want to be a subject matter curator.

18:29Like Matt Wolf, who you and I both know, who was in a mastermind with us, decided to go all in on AI, had had a challenge with lots of things, was kind of trying to find his niche. Now he's got, I think, about a half a million people on a YouTube channel that's grown in just about 18 months in the AI space because he found something that he could curate. And he's basically a news guy, right? He's like, here's the new things and here's how you can use them. And people find that interesting and valuable and he should be able to monetize that really well. Then it comes down to that content beast.

19:03And so I've heard a million people talk about it a million different ways. I think that starting with a platform to get started, whatever is easiest for you, whether it's, I mean, I guess I would lean harder into the category that your people are probably going to be hanging out at if you can identify that. But then, you know, if you're after business people, LinkedIn is a good place to build. If you are, you know, in other areas like newsletters, podcasts, and blogs, and, and then all of the social, particularly social video, and then their short form, long form, if you're going to go, you know, to more of a tick tock kind of thing or YouTube thing, but I think just getting started when you're doing it yourself that this like my journey has been, I don't know what the heck to do.

19:51I know I need to create content, bought podcast stuff three different times, sold it as it gathered dust in the corner. Finally was like, okay, I'm going to do this. And I did that after doing Facebook. And Facebook was, as you probably remember, just taking my video and how business lunch actually got started was at lunch. I had lunch with people that were interesting all the time in my world. We'd have good conversations. And one lunch, I just happened to pull out my phone at the end of a conversation that we had. I had taken a couple of notes. There were three things I was like, would you guys mind if I recorded something?

20:28Basically, I handed them my iPhone, hit record, handed it to them, had them pointed at me. And then I said, you know, I was talking with Ryan about this really cool thing. And we talked about this. I'm going to take the phone from Ryan now. And now I'm going to ask him some questions. And then I would take it, turn it around. And it was terrible. And unfortunately, unusable for anything else because it was so bad, the video quality and the, you know, this was several iPhones ago. And but I did that and started doing it regularly. And then and then to increase my audience, identified my ideal audience on Facebook and ran boosts myself, even though that was the stupidest way to advertise on Facebook.

21:09It was the way that I actually could do it. And there was no friction because I didn't need an editor. I didn't need somebody following me around. I didn't have to spend a lot of money to do it. I literally already had an iPhone. I didn't have any lav microphones. I didn't have anything that could go wrong other than I forgot to press record. Yes, I did forget a couple of times. But that like, like whatever gets you started to me, that's, that's the thing in the most friction-free method that you can. Then I tried to learn more about it and found that I failed miserably because I couldn't produce content consistently across multiple platforms because I didn't have time.

21:45And so I would try my hand at YouTube and then stop and try my hand. And then that just destroys your growth. You've got to be like regular, regular, regular with whatever you're going to do. So then I started doing the podcast. I basically hired my son to run the podcast stuff. And so that gave me the ability to have somebody else that was doing it that would then upload the stuff. And then gradually over time, I've added people. I went through the whole phase of having one person that runs your content. And so I would hire an agency and they were supposed to do everything. Terrible way to go.

22:24Content did not grow at all in any kind of meaningful way for the longest time while I was paying as much as 10 grand a month to have people doing it. And then I realized that it's really, you have to have people who live in each of the forms of content. Your podcast person, ultimately, if you're going to go all in, you can't have one person running content. It's got to be somebody that lives in and specializes in podcasts, somebody that lives and specializes in newsletters, somebody that lives and specializes in TikTok, somebody that lives and specializes in YouTube. Long form and short form, different things, my friends.

23:01And that is where we are now and that's expensive, but I'm watching it grow faster and faster And it is monetizing and paying for itself because I'm getting more and more people that are coming to me talking about, can we do a deal? So that I think is, that's a very long explanation. So I'll shut up. But like that, that's been kind of my journey from, you know, I just can't do this to I think I've got a decent machine now. And it is ramping up pretty rapidly now that I've gotten to that point of being able to make that investment. yeah i do it all the time though yeah and and i think that's i think if you're gonna do this if you're gonna have a founder brand you need to pick a path and i think there are two and i think the two paths are you're either always there or you're missed when you're gone you either need to i'm i'm gonna commit to i'm always gonna be there where do you mean by there freaking everywhere everywhere where they are.

24:01And so I'm going to start with one channel, like you said, but my strategy is to scale out to all the different channels. If you look at Gary Vaynerchuk, if you look at Grant Cardone, if you look at Alex Ramon, I mean, you look at anybody who's kind of anybody who's considered to have a founder brand and that's the path that they chose. And it's the path that you've largely followed as well. But you need to know if that's the path that you choose, yeah, what it looks like is, to your point, step one, have something to say, have a unique perspective, which is going to require that you actually did something.

24:33If you're an entrepreneur, if you're a founder, if you're building something, you got stuff to talk about. You're building something, you got something to talk about. You're actively serving people. You're going to be a subject matter expert, or your business isn't going to grow. So probably a check on that one. And then, I love what you said about, you've got to just start putting stuff out there. And this was the mistake that I made is I want everything to essentially be published in its final form. And this is like an old school idea. It's how book publishing worked. It's how movies were filmed.

25:04You didn't see the finished product until it was the finished product. You didn't see anything while it was being made. It's not how content happens anymore. I struggle with that. So you've got to put out things to figure out what are the ideas that are starting to catch. it's way more of the comic that goes and tours and all the small clubs to figure out the jokes that are funny before they do the hbo special yeah then you can begin to package up your core ideas into you know into more comprehensive complete assets whether it is youtube shows whether it is a podcast whether it is a book and there's varying degrees of that but i do think that that strategy you know still holds but there is the other side that i think is also a viable strategy that I've seen other founders do, which is the, I want to publish regularly, but not as frequently, but I want it to be so good that when I am not published, I'm missed.

25:59And I think that is the standard. And if you're going to do that, I think it starts off looking really similar. You know, same thing. You got to have some chops, you got to put out and drip out some messages. But then once you're sort of clear on, okay, this is what I have to say. Now, I think you might want to shift into, I'm going to publish, you know, you might publish a newsletter once a week or a YouTube show once a week. And maybe that's it. Yeah. Maybe do a podcast episode, you know, once a week, but I, you know, and, and maybe eventually you, you write a book and this, this book becomes an artifact that people want.

26:37But I truly think there's only, there's only two paths you're either always there everywhere or you're there consistently but not frequently and when you're gone you're missed but frequently for the algorithm it's still once a week you know it's oh yeah yeah to be any less than that and i'll tell you guys like if you haven't done this man once a week comes along it seems every day it's yeah yeah you think it's every seven days and the calendar would suggest that it's every seven days but that's not true yeah every other freaking day you're thinking about it i think the only the only other way that you could get around it is if you have an email newsletter yeah because that's not as impacted by but but still if you're going to publish an email newsletter less than once a week what's the point yeah yeah so i think at a minimum the decision to have a personal brand a founder brand is is a decision to show up at least once a week yeah and then the only other decision you're going to make is I'm not going to show up all day, every day or just once.

27:40And then it gets to kind of the content. I got this from Chris Krohn and I, it really has been helpful is that you need to dedicate a day to content. So like I dedicate a day a week to that. It doesn't always work out. Our podcast, we're recording this, I think on a Wednesday, I think today's Wednesday versus a Monday. We usually record on Mondays, but this Monday was a holiday. So we, you know, we, we adjusted it, but having a commitment in your calendar that you've got a day when you're going to knock out content, like next Monday, I've got three hours in the morning to knock out 30 videos with our video shorts people.

28:18And, and Monday's the day that I try to do that because Monday I'm usually in town in the studio and can do that. And the studio is in my house, by the way, as I think yours is, you've got them both, I think at the office in your house, right? Yeah. Yeah. And, And but but that that blocked time when you're going to create content can really produce a ton of content. Because if like if I just did a long form YouTube and this podcast, we could cut up all the YouTube stuff and have all kinds of shorts and all that. We're going again, like I said, all in. And so we have shorts that are generated based on data that comes back from the people that research that say, these are the things the algorithm wants.