3 Levels of Building a Personal Brand | Ep 984

0:00In a world of AI, building a personal brand is one of the most valuable things that you can do. And that's what helped us generate through our portfolio economies over$250 million a year. And we recently broke the Guinness World Record for the fastest selling nonfiction book of all time. Money models generate$106 million sales in 72 hours. So in this video, I want to show you three stages that I went through in building a personal brand and how you can do the same. So starting with stage one is do epic shit. And the reason that everyone skips this step is because it's probably the hardest step.

0:30Because every 23-year-old wants to start a personal brand because they see it online, right? And what everyone forgets is the personal part. Not making videos or posting, but actually having real skills, accomplishments, or opinions or takes that are worth watching in the first place. But what makes an opinion worthwhile, right? You have unique insights or experience that the audience doesn't have, and that's why they value what you're saying. And so if you want an epic personal brand, you have to do epic shit first. The proof is in the pudding. It's not even in the pudding. The proof is the pudding, right?

0:57You'll build a bigger brand making content for six months after a decade of experience than you will have a decade of content with only six months of experience. Because no one cares about your opinion until they know it's worth something. And so you have to back up your talk with your walk. And so think do shit, demonstration. And there's two ways to win in terms of doing this, which is that you have something that you accomplish, right? Or you do so much work that people want to bargain on that work. So if I make content that's, let's say I'm in the relationship romance niche, right? If I go on 100 dates and then I make a video about those 100 dates and it's 12 minutes long, I get two seasons of The Bachelor in 12 minutes.

1:39That's a good deal. And so if you think about what humans want out of content is they want speed. This is education, to be clear. They want speed. They want to bargain for their time. The thing that we all feel like we don't have enough of is time. And so people will buy with their attention for things that paid down the time that they don't have to spend and can get all the benefits. Like why did Cliff Notes boom back in the day, which, by the way, if you're watching this, probably don't know what Cliff Notes is because it was something that I used to. Spark Notes was something else. And people would like you don't read Shakespeare.

2:08You read the Cliff Notes. So you guys just watch it, you know, talk to AI and get it. But like back in our day, right, we still had to read the Cliff Notes to pass the test. Right. And so people want the cliff notes, but you have to still write the book to get the cliff notes. And the cliff notes are going to do more than the actual book will for many of you when you're making content. They don't want to go through five years of entrepreneurship. They want to learn the lessons in five minutes. Second stage is that once you have the cred, you associate yourself. And again, the credibility can come from volume of work or volume of accomplishments.

2:39It can come from either. So if you're like, oh, but I haven't accomplished anything. Yeah, show the work. Show the work. Do 1 ,000 outreach attempts. Do 10 ,000 doors that you knock on and document it. That is the work. People will happily not want to do work, watch you do work, and then get the lessons from it. That's the idea. So anyways, stage two is once you have that, associate yourself with positive things over and over again. So what do I mean by positive? The positive has to do with what your audience or ideal customer finds positive, which also, by the way, means that you have to know who you're going after.

3:09Branding, people make feel like it's this big amorphous thing, but it's just associating you with something else. So if you appear on a podcast with someone, you have a minor association. If that podcast person becomes your co-host, it's a stronger association because it happens more and more times. And so just think of them, these pairings over. And I've paired myself with a beard, a hat, the acquisition.com tank talk flannels, so much so that there are Halloween costumes of flannels and tank tops. Right. Because I've made the association so strong that people are like, oh, that guy is dressing up like Hermosi.

3:40right but like fundamentally like there's nothing really inherently unique about a flannel or a tank top it's that i do it every single day now if i say black tank black turtleneck and jeans and new balances who do you think steve jobs right if i say red s on your chest i can just give you that and you know it's superman right because in every single appearance he looks the same and so the association that's made is strong so that's a visual association now what we're talking about at a kind of the 2.0 level is what are the non-visual associations that we're making, right? And so one is your brand and the other is the thing that your audience or customer likes.

4:18And so what you do to do that is you figure out who your avatar is. Ideally, a market that is growing, that is in pain, has a problem to solve, can afford your stuff, and they're easy to find, all right? Now, the easy to find part is something that in my first book, Offers, I talk about, because back in the day, algorithms weren't as good as they are. So you had to like put a beacon out saying, this is for you. But AI knows who it's for now and will serve it directly. Now, once you know who they are, we have to figure out what they like. So then we associate ourselves, our brand, through the thing that they like, which is you make content about the thing they like.

4:53You make products they like, both free and paid. And you appear next to the people they like. And so the example of this going wrong is Dylan Mulvaney makes an ad for Budweiser, and it went super viral. The problem is it went viral for the wrong reason, because the people who drink Bud Light and Budweiser don't like trans people. Now, to be clear, that's not all Budweiser drinkers or all Bud Light drinkers, but the majority of them didn't want that association. And so they netted a loss in revenue. And this is where this gets interesting. I make no comment here. My point is that there is an audience, a smaller audience that loved that association.

5:34It was just smaller than the core audience. And so Dylan Mulvaney might be an amazing brand association for a different product or company who has an audience that like maybe for Starbucks, that would be a better association because they have a more left-leaning audience, I think. So I want to be clear, there's no inherently good or bad association. It's just, is it a good association for the ideal customer that you have, your ICP, your avatar? And so if they like that association, some of those cool points will rub off on you. And if you make 100 cool associations, then all of a sudden you can just appear without the association and some of that will rub off on you until eventually you become a brand, right?

6:15Now let me give you a more example of a bad way of doing it. And to be clear, all these brands I'm talking about have been masters at branding and it's only a parent that made a mistake because of how strong their brands are. Right. And so what did the, what did Budweiser do to repair that? They made a super strong association with UFC. And so for their demographic, UFC was a great pairing for them. And so then they saw some recovery and they kind of became a little bit, they moved to the right. We'll just call it that way. Real quick. I'm going to show you the exact 10 stage roadmap from zero to 100 million plus that less than 1 % of companies finish.

6:50I've now done multiple times. And so I can say with a lot of confidence that these are the stages as headcount increases that you need to get through. And I broke each of these down by eight different functions of the business, what the constraint feels like, what are the symptoms of it when you're going through it, and then what steps we actually took to graduate. And we've done this across software, physical products, service businesses, brick and mortar, all of this, and it works. And it's my gift to you. It's absolutely free. And so the link's in the description, but you just go acquisition.com forward slash roadmap, just enter info and it'll spit it right back to you all free.

7:21So let me give you another example of a big brand that made a big brand mistake. And you wouldn't even think about it at the onset, but let's dive a little deeper. So Coca-Cola Classic made an ad around Christmas time that was like an AI Christmas ad. And so I can almost think about the meeting of like, it's like, listen, we got to lean into AI. It's the future, all this stuff, right? And what ended up happening is that people backlashed against it because what is AI associated with with the everyone? Well, many people are very afraid of AI, right? And Coca-Cola has a very, like, I would say vanilla Coca-Cola classic open happiness.

7:54It's about as broad and general America and now global, obviously, but like they want to just get everyone to drink their drink, right? They're not trying to be polar on any side of the, uh, of the, of the train tracks, but AI is a very polarizing issue because so many people are afraid of it. And so by associating themselves, because people would tell that it was AI, with AI, then they're associated with job cuts, job losses, big fortune 500 companies, cutting people out of creative departments. What about all the actors they used to pay? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? And it creates this wrong narrative.

8:24And so it wasn't even that the ad was made with AI. It was that AI itself has a brand, which it does. And the pairing of Coca-Cola with it was not good. Now, could NVIDIA have an AI ad? Absolutely. Could Microsoft have an AI ad? For sure, right? All of these could have AI ads and it would have been great. So was an AI ad inherently bad or good? It depends on the brand. It depends on the reinforcement history, the associations that that brand made over time. And so let me show you another big company that I would say is less cutting edge, ironically, but Apple. And I would say that if Steve Jobs were there, Siri probably would have been one of the first voice AIs and we would have had a different product than they have, but that's okay.

9:06anyways. But Apple made an ad purely with the human touch side. But the idea was that was very well received. And so if you think about Apple, they're so big now that they're like, everybody's got iPhones. They're like Coca-Cola. They're general popular. They're technically bigger than Coca-Cola. But they're mass market, right? And so if you're marketing a mass market, you have to think about mass market wants, which is a lot of times not necessarily what the people who are making the ads like or what, which is why it's always about the customer. And so long-term, in the second step, we associate ourselves with cooler things than people, and we make content about it.

9:41And we just want to make sure that our products match our promises. So we create a virtuous cycle of branding. So what we say is the first level of branding about ourselves. And then people consume our product, and it's what other people say. And then finally, you have a customer who heard what other people said, and they buy it, and then it's about what they say. And if you buy a product, it doesn't matter how good the marketing was, you're going to make a decision about it. My favorite example of this is like, if you go to a movie, you're going to see a trailer. You might think, oh, that trailer was interesting.

10:09And then a friend of yours sees the movie and you say, oh, how was it? And the person might say, oh, the movie was great. And then you say, fine, I'll go see it. And then when you see the movie, you will make the decision and you will not care about the trailer and you will not care about what your friend said. You will just care what you think. And so ultimately, if that movie was good, you're more likely to see a movie with that actor or about that topic or from that director or from that production studio as a result of that, because they fulfilled their promise, right? And so the idea is that once you do that process, the virtuous cycle of branding is you continue to do that and then basically wait five years and don't give up.

10:43Now, the third and final step is what I'll call defending the belt, all right? And so what Coca-Cola, what Apple, what UFC, what these large brands have to do is once you get to the top, you have to stay relevant, right? Because that's actually the thing that degrades these kind of empires. So Rome was defeated by the barbarians, not by a head-on match, but because they nibbled away at the borders. And so brands, once they're big, they get nibbled away into irrelevance. All these little players do things that are a little bit more relevant for smaller audiences, and they start gaining market share.

11:16And so what does a big brand do to stay a big brand? You have to fight newer, hungrier challenges to defend the belt. Like somebody can't just win the UFC and then say, I've won forever, right? They've got to stay in the title spot and let people take shots at them to usurp them, right? And so one of my favorite examples, obviously like Red Bull, when they did a jump from outer space, right? Like why would an energy drink do a jump from outer space? Because they have to take the most extreme example of craziness of like, that guy must have been hopped up on so much stuff, do something that insane.

11:50And if he was able to do that, then you know what? Maybe if I'm a little bit tired, it'll give me a little boost this afternoon, right? And so your defending the belt is doing an aspirational thing that your audience finds cooler interesting, right? Right. And so the thing is, is that if, if, if Red Bull did that, but if they just stopped doing advertisements and they stopped doing big brand moments like that, eventually they would fade into a relevance when another energy drink company comes along, that's new and hip. So they've got to, they got to show, they got to kind of like put their phallus on the table, if you will.

12:22Right. They got to show people what's up. They got to show who daddy is, like still remind them or mommy, whatever your vibe is. Right. You still got to say who's boss, Who can still show up? Can John Jones still show up and still put a hurting on someone? Right? And so let me give you a couple examples of this. Like Apple and Steve Jobs famously did these big, huge keynotes. Those were these huge events, these brand moments of their innovations, what they had done. Elon is famous for doing these big Tesla. He did the RoboTaxis. He did the Optibots. For us, we did the book launches. We did the launch for the Leeds book.

12:57We did the launch for the Money Models book. I sold the company. This was kind of my first big brand moment, if you will, of selling the company for just under 50 million bucks. And so each of these things are brand moments that are aspirational for the target audience, right? Open AI and Claude, when they go make their updates, they make big fanfare about it. And so you have to have these belt moments. And what I think is really interesting, I'd say for me as a business owner, shifting a little bit towards business, it underpits branding, is that internally, I can tell you when you have this big goal and it has to be public.

13:29That's the thing. It's like, you have to kind of like set the date, make the shot across the bout. And you've got to let the world know that you're going to do this thing. And the amount of energy that it incites within the team and the alignment of where we're going is unbeatable. And this is why you hear that Steve Jobs and the Elon Musk's talk about these insane timelines. And they're so demanding because they know they've got this public thing that they can't cancel. There is a reason that sports has maintained relevance for such a long time. And why is that? Because they play a championship every year, literally seven days after the championship is over.

14:01Like no one even pays attention to it. They're literally all the commenters are talking about what's next season going to look like. Who's, who's on the waiver wire. Who's getting traded. What coaches are moving around? Like people move on, but they need to have this thing. And you know what? You're only as good as your last season, right? If you were super bowl champion, the next season, you go one in one in, you know, 15 or one in 16 or whatever it is, you're no longer relevant. So you have to keep defending the belt, right? If you want to create a brand, you're trying to create a dynasty. What do you do right now?

14:28Number one, do epic shit in terms of volume or a quality outcome. So a big accomplishment or lots of work that you can show your work for, and that becomes your initial content. Then we continue with this loop by associating with the stuff that people want. So business owners want to make money. Girls want to get pretty or they want to lose weight. We associate with those things and we associate with the people that those people find cool or interesting. And we do that pairing over and over and over again. And then some of those people where I say, wow, this person is cool. And so I want to buy their stuff.

14:56And you just need to make sure that your stuff fulfills the promise. And it's also cool and good. When that happens, you start to build yourself a brand. You now have a brand at that point when you've completed that loop. At this point, you just continue that loop as much as you can, but you still need to have the third step, which is you have to defend the belt. You got to find these big moments, these big external goals that you can drive towards things that scare you things where you actually have real stakes. That's the thing that people make, like you have to have stakes. You have to have skin in the game.

15:22Otherwise, it's not interesting. What is the first thing that happens in every reality show? They show the big amount of money, right? Who wants to be a millionaire? There's a million dollars. There's inherent stakes. And so you have to create stakes both within the company, because if we don't do this, we're going to be humiliated. We're going to miss our goals. We could lose a lot of money. And that puts everyone's jobs at risk. Like there's real stakes inside the company. But because of that, people out on the outside, it makes you and the goal more interesting. And so what do they do? They pay you with attention.

15:51Thank you.