How to Build Authority That Actually Converts: Ash Jones

0:00Ash Jones:Who's the man behind the branding of Stephen Bartlett, behind the branding of Gary Neville? Who jumps to mind for you? There is one man, and we recently sat down with him and picked his brains on all things personal branding and business. It's Ash Jones. Ash Jones. What did you learn from him? I learned so much. I actually learned so much when it comes to, there are so many personal branding gurus out there. He takes a completely different take on it. He looks at personal branding in the same way that David Bowie does. and he talks about how to play the long game and actually do it to generate business.

0:33Ash Jones:I'll be honest, I was a personal branding skeptic before this episode and I was ready to like, I'm gonna challenge Ash on this when we get into it. But actually I was pleasantly surprised by some of his takes and I've gone and applied a lot of those things straight away. Wow, an incredible episode. If you are looking to get better at personal branding and play the long game when it comes to developing yourself, you'll love this episode. Ash Jones. Hello. Welcome to the podcast. Thank you. Thank you for joining us. I'm going to hit you with a big open question. Let's see where we end up. Who are you and what problem do you solve?

1:08I'm Ash, first and foremost, and I run a company called Great Influence. And the problem that I've been solving for the past 10 years is helping people in business to it's quite broad at this point but fundamentally to me it's to help them try to have more of an influential voice within their industry and try to provide a platform for the business ventures that they're working on nice okay so for anyone that's listening to this why would you be the the person that they continue listening to on this um i've i've been in the space for 10 years now which i don't i've not met many people that have got 10 years experience um and then there's a couple of names i've worked with in those two years like me personally the 10 years have been split between stephen bartlett and gary neville the first five years of my career with Stephen Bartlett the last five years have been working with Gary Neville and in between that I've kind of done it for a whole range of like startup to scale up to global corporate from like a Huel Grenade MyProtein Huel kind of like startup scale up right through to like now we're working with like Santander's CEO and booking.com and yeah so a bit of a broad range of experience from like startup scale up global corporate high profile individual and everything

2:45Ash Jones:in between so it's like we said it's a broad term let's keep it broad for now we'll niche it down and you see people who are kind of approaching personal brand they've approached it as i'm sharing absolutely everything like my mental breakdown when my tires have gone flat on my car and stuff like that or they're sharing probably like a false view of like hustle pony type i'm winning everything what what is the actual do's and don'ts of personal brandon um i think one thing that gets confused on the first point is like you're you have to be conscious of the perception of how you're coming across in the context of running a business so take for example recently um i've seen you see this more with like e-com founders that tend to sit on like tiktok and instagram a bit more they're a bit more personal and they're a bit more influencer-y in their content than someone on linkedin might be for example and i think at times it veers into like you'll have them like quite literally having breakdowns on tiktok and And I came across one the other day and I hadn't heard of the founder before.

4:02I'd heard of the founder before, but I'd never seen their content before. And it was the first thing that I saw. And I was like, oh, wow, you've posted that. And it was kind of like, I think at times people forget that, like the optics of what they're sharing in relation to the business impact. Like you've got stakeholders that see it, whether that's employees, whether that's your senior team whether it's the investors whether it's potential investors whether it's people that might engage you one day or this kind of thing and I think in the whole personal brand piece maybe at times gets a little lost is the idea of like the optics of what you're saying and who's reading it and how it's putting you across to those people in a professional context on a personal context it's like you can see the benefit for it because it's like you look in the comments and it's like people resonate with the more vulnerable side of things and it's like good to see that people are still human and all the other kind of reasons why you might resonate with someone online because like take me as a founder i'm going through what you're going through we're all going through in different ways in different contexts in different scenarios but fundamentally the problems and challenges still the same and you want to cry as well so you see that and you think ah it's nice i'm not alone but then you think like yeah a stakeholder might see it and how does that land with them i feel like in at times that whole side of it gets lost and in conversations i have with people i always make it very clear that my thinking tends to be like stakeholder first and then everything follows so it's like almost protect your immediate bubbles and then if you can reach the further bubbles you do but it's with the messaging that sits right for the the closer bubbles in your world that you've got and how you come across to them and the perception of it and i think maybe that got lost over the last like four or five years where like an influencer style way of being in creating content and putting yourself out there into the world started to bleed into business and entrepreneurship and about maybe three four years ago I just had a real feeling that business and entrepreneurship was starting to become a pillar of popular culture in the same way as like fitness fashion gaming sports music and all that kind of thing was and that turned out to be the case where it's like now founders are getting followers on TikTok and they're ending up on TV shows and all this kind of thing and I think that it's a good thing but you have to still be wary that it doesn't operate in the same way that those other pillars do in how they're able to present themselves to the world and put themselves across and it's maybe similar to something like athletes athletes have to be quite like conscious of the optics of what they personally put out into the world because they're so public facing and they're part of a club and you see at times like athletes will not do things on social media and they'll talk about how difficult it is to deal with the challenge that social media presents and i think that's because they feel that they can't respond to it how they would want to respond to it because they're thinking i can't because of who i am and who who i play for and the fan base and all this kind of thing whereas that doesn't exist in i think at times in business or entrepreneurship it gets a little blurred especially when the founder is like they're the ones in control whereas a player in a club is not in they know they've got an answer to the manager or the agent or the board or whoever founder doesn't have to answer to anyone 10 out of 10 so you can see how the lines get a little blurred in like the influencerification of putting yourself out there

7:48Ash Jones:kind of thing what why do you think then because you think loads of examples can't you like when when we were all growing up facebook you probably didn't even think about mark zuckerberg or probably even know who he was when we were when we were kids and then there was a point where you did no he was he's kind of a bit introverted kind of guy behind the scenes and now he's like wearing a chain and he's got cool hair and he's doing jiu-jitsu do you see that as like a doctor business choice to put him in that wheelhouse um there's leaked emails from like i think it was around lockdown kind of times and i think they're with mark cuban and they're talking about like zuckerberg as he is like a voice of the millennial and how they leverage that and how they like lean into it and try to shape perception in the right way and kind of platform him as something bigger than facebook so they've openly been like talking about in these leaked emails so it's and to think that a company that size like there's no way that an individual is operating like just free reign do whatever you want and also he knows the responsibility that he's got in his role everything will be so deeply considered and measured just innately from him given the position that he's in so i think there is an element of like whatever you're seeing is thought about considered it's probably spoken about with multiple people but whether it's entirely like doctored i'm not sure i feel that the person that you're seeing is a lot closer to the one that he actually is away from things but they've maybe like realized that that's a good thing for facebook and ultimately for him and therefore try to platform that and it becomes like a strategy and a tactic around it but it doesn't feel like they're like go do jujitsu do you know what i mean yeah yeah he's genuinely like this is what i do away from it they're just like why don't we capture some of that and kind of platform that so yeah i actually think what they've done has been really really really smart because it doesn't feel like they've tried to force a personality out in front that it looks like they've actually looked at who he actually is and gone what of this can we spotlight more and empower and encourage him to do that and he's been entirely on board with it it doesn't feel as well it feels like it's led by him rather than led by somebody else and i have no proof of that i can just like feel it when i watch it so it's not like they're like wheeling him out in front of the camera and he's kind of like like i feel like he wants to do all the stuff that he's doing which is like a really important part of it as well you think there's a lot of people where they're just they're told what to do and um i didn't interview for the athletic recently on like footballers and personal brands and said like the problem that exists with athletes and it's kind of the same within business is that the footballers are told what to say and what to do rather than kind of given guidance as to who they are and what they're about and that's like my process is try to understand the individual and almost like spotlight that to them so that they're empowered to go about it themselves knowing they've almost got like guardrails to kind of sit within and footballers don't have that they're just told what to say and what to do and they're like over comms and over pr to death and i think yeah it doesn't feel that way when i look at someone like zook obviously there is like there's massive amounts of people teams whatever involved but it does feel quite like not put on for show but it's definitely platformed and been a tactical thing that they've done.

11:37Zach Thompson, do you ever get sick of calling kebab houses and nanas when you're trying to speak to qualified decision makers? I do. Well, I think I might have found the solution. 98 % correct qualified data, which means when you're cold calling, you're always going to be speaking to the right person. Do you know what the solution is? It can't be Prospio, can it? Prospio, let me spell it for you. P-R-O-S-P-E-O dot i o how if you're looking for great qualified data then you know what the solution is prospio dot io it can feel like a bit of a contradiction at times because there's all this advice about like be authentic and then you're thinking about this perception so people are thinking so like mark zuckerberg is thinking how do i want to be perceived and and when you can rely on actually well i want to be perceived like that and and that's the way i am that's authentic that works I imagine if I was to ask you for examples of cases where you think this has been an example of somebody who's it's come across the perception is trying to push somebody one way, but actually it goes against what you know, that feeling.

12:47Can you think of any examples where people have when it comes to personal branding massively got it wrong?

12:58um nothing that's like glaring off the top of my head obviously people that have like there was that um it was the woman that started the company and then she went to prison like that that kind of thing it's like yeah and maybe like the he's the we work guy adam newman and it was like very cultish and it didn't work out in the end but it worked in the moment and but yeah there's no one that really stands out of like getting it glaringly wrong that springs to mind um yeah well let's let's stick on personal branding then like it like personal branding in if we were doing a mind map the only reason you would have a personal brand is for opportunities that that's that's the way i i think of it and when you think about like what those opportunities could be for somebody with a personal brand what where where does your mind automatically go um i think it's quite purest to assume that it's just opportunities i think i've learned 10 years in the game that like ego exists and it's very difficult for even the purest person to get away from that um but yeah for me it's it's just it's creating leverage so that you when you decide what you want to do you have some kind of influence and control over making that happen and then also there's like the unknown that you didn't even know that you would be interested in coming and knocking on your door as a result um so you'd see that with anyone that's like high profile the opportunities that have come their way from having a platform that they've roads they've gone down in their career that they never would have if the opportunity didn't come to them they probably would have never considered it and that might have like changed the course of their career and i think that to me is like one the things that you know you want to do you can influence and kind of create more leverage for and kind of control but two also the things that you have no idea that you've even got as an opportunity and i think you've seen that with like i don't know if you'd have gone back like 10 years and asked steve bartlett like do you think you'd be able to like sit in a room with michelle obama one day he'd have been like no and it probably wasn't even on his radar 10 years ago but it's really like the direction that his career has taken him in is taken in into all these things that you probably would have never considered being something that you would do so there's that to it as well but i think fundamentally it's like the things that you can control and if you think in business like we spend so much time doing what i'd refer to as like the dog's work of like things that we don't want to do um whether that's like i don't know opportunity creating things that we put time into and you're like it'd be so much easier i just didn't have to do this stuff and kind of part of it is taking down the amount of dog's work that you have to do because you're starting to bring things your way and like even on a micro level like I've been posting content for the past four or five years and now four or five years in I'm starting to see that impact of like ah okay this has come to me rather than me trying to go to it which just makes life a lot easier and i i've not had to really work very hard to do that like yes you've got to do the work and put the time in and put the output in but it's not like reinventing the wheel and it's not like doing something that you're not capable of for a lot of people so yeah i feel like the the wins are long but when they come along you're very thankful that you did it in the first place but you've kind of got to get to that like five ten year stint of doing it before it really starts to unlock because a lot of people just won't it takes a long time to for people to associate you with the thing that you actually do and i think of like a lot of people that have maybe like built a personal brand i struggle to know what they actually do with their day today it's true like think of a lot of people that might spring to my take linkedin for example think of the names what business do they run fuck knows and it just takes a long time like unless the the business is the reason why you're famous if you're famous for you a lot of the time it takes people a bit of time to catch up to what you actually do with your time apart from being like popular online and yeah i think that's why you need like four or five years in the game because it's like it's that idea of like seven touch points in a sale like it takes so many touch points for someone to be like even now like i get it all the time so what a great influence actually do i'm like i've got a problem like people know me but a lot of the time they might have heard of great influence you might know it's a personal branding agency but what does that mean and i've

17:55Ash Jones:been doing this for seven years so is is there a thing then of to maybe combat that i'm thinking like alex homozy kind of comes to mind of getting the there's a bit of value in there there's a bit of like here's my gym routine and then there's probably a video closely after here's an offer of something i can give is there maybe an argument too made of some people are missing the like where's the offer where's the direct link between what you actually can give to someone yeah maybe but what does he do what's acquisition that acquisition acquires companies but what does that mean like what kind of i don't know probably through some crazy smoke and mirrors i don't know it's like garavaner chuck runs an agency i don't know what campaigns he did i'm not i don't think he knows what he does like i know he's got an agency but and i know they're in like marketing advertising but is it is it like across digital social yeah that's interesting yeah yeah the actual weeds of it and i don't i couldn't spring to mind like a campaign that they've worked on and something that they've done and gary v's been kind of in my sphere for the past decade and I know he's running VaynerMedia and there's like VaynerX and things.

19:05You tend to get like the very top line of what people with influence do but there's a whole like how do you actually, it takes five, 10 years for people to genuinely understand what the business does.

19:19Ash Jones:Do you ever speak to people that are at that stage so they're kind of out there a bit, they've got like a network, an audience already but they're struggling to make that kind of final two-year jump?

19:35to me there's like take linkedin there's like two different types of people that have built um an audience or influence however you want to put it over the past few years and one set of them has gone down the route of being like so heavily tied to what they do day to day in business and that's tend to be like the only thing that they talk about and then the other is more like i'll talk about anything that will resonate with people i think the people that are probably getting the most business opportunity now are the first cohort they have the smaller audience but they're probably like got a stronger micro network and it's also very tied into like the names of the springs like joe glover at marketing me up like i he's never tried to be like joe glover he's joe from the marketing me up you literally just followed me like before we start this podcast right okay great guy um or like i had a call earlier with andy lambert who was part of content cal um and like he's just been very like in b2b and i just know what he's about like and he's never tried to veer outside of that and i think now when it comes like create an opportunity those two people have probably got a lot more they can open a lot stronger doors the influencer can open more but it's a bit vague and probably a bit weaker whereas they can open quite strong doors directly in the things that they're doing if that makes sense so for that first cohort then you've got someone that is known for what they do, that is your thing and I think we post every day about sales and cold calling and that is the goal, let's say you never know, in 10 years time me and Zach, we have these dream chats someday that we start a fizzy drinks brand or we start a gummy supplement who knows where the future's going to take how does somebody be over here known for one thing and then transition because surely if you started posting about something completely different everyone's gonna be like wait a minute what's going on who's this guy yeah it's i work with a guy called thomas howe robson carl who runs a company called i say i work with a guy he's like like somebody wouldn't know who he is he scored one of the most famous goals in wales history um he was a footballer for a number of teams arsenal reading west brom played in premier league played for wales scored a very famous goal in 2016 against belgium and he started a supplement company called the turmeric co and we started working with him as he was in his final season in the premier league so he's just coming to the end of retirement he was doing bits of broadcast he had this supplement company and he was interested in like right okay the next five years after football is going to be about business and entrepreneurship but everybody knows me for scoring that goal against Belgium how do I go from one to the other and I had a call yesterday with oh I won't say who it was but is one of the most famous footballers of the last 20 years i had a call with his agent and it's similar thing there where it's like he's he's retired now every um any reference he got asked to go on a podcast and he was like the he's just tired of talking about football and everything he does now is like business and investing and he's um he's got a high role in one of the biggest clubs in europe like that and i was saying that essentially you have to look at it like Like he wants to be over here, but he's currently here.

23:18You can't just like, he might be sick of talking about football, but the world, he's not told the world that he's about anything other than football. So of course they're going to ask him about football. And there has to be an element of like, this is what happened with Thomas, is that you take like a phased approach of like, right, you are this right now and you want to be in this world. So you're over here in football, you want to be in this world of business entrepreneurship. how do you lean into what you are now but do it in a way that resonates with the world over here and um there was an interview with the the player that i referenced meeting yesterday i watched an interview that he did and he kind of spoke about like as a footballer the importance of like he was like i am me nobody can change who i am and you've seen it in like he's had disputes with managers a bit of like a kind of bad boy image kind of thing and it's like he spoke about the importance of a footballer being authentic and i pulled that line from the interview and i was like essentially part of the game that you have to do is like you you can take the lesson from over there which is around like the importance of authenticity and you can pull it into that world and they'll be able to link to it because they've seen you as a footballer which is very easy to grasp onto as a concept so you can you've gotten in like that as a thing you can talk about is like the importance of authenticity in business or in branding or in marketing and how that plays out in my world is it looks like this and you talk about the link between the two and you start to reframe in people's heads the idea of who you are and what you're about and you're not talking you're talking not about it as a footballer but somebody in this world who had a previous experience so again it's like you can't just jump from one to the other you almost have to create these like transition phases um and it's something to seem like i've been working with gary neville for five years and very much the exact same thing of like how do you take the experiences from one world and start to create something that connects them to people in the next one but in a way that they associate you with does that yeah yeah that's kind of the way that you do it it's like going from one to the other but you have to they have to sit near each other i think i don't think you could go from like i don't know doing b2b tech to selling i don't know pens or something like is the world close enough for the transition to be there and you can find the lines that connect to one another um and that's why like athletes and business and entrepreneurship lines up so nicely because of that idea of like overcoming challenges and finding solutions and high performance and there's so much alignment between those two worlds it makes it very easy for an athlete to authentically and genuinely transition into the world of business and entrepreneurship and you're starting to see it now in in elements where there's a couple of people that have done it quite well um obviously the clients i've worked with um but like uh ilkai gundigan who is an ex-man city player he's now at galatasaray and he's on linkedin and there's elements that he's done there where he's kind of mario goetzer is a great example like if you look at what he does on linkedin he does a similar thing where it's like he's obviously got people working with him will understand that he can't just turn up as mario gozer like it's just not going to work instead they've gone how do we fit mario gozer and his experience and what he's doing now in his previous career into this world in a way that resonates with that world and i think that's maybe the bit that people coming from one into the other kind of miss they just turn up as

27:11Ash Jones:their existing self in that world and hope it works so we we've had lots of conversations around personal branding on this podcast this conversation already feels maybe slightly different in terms of it feels more about perception where i think a lot of other this will probably make it up but a lot of personal branding conversations are typically about linkedin and how to go viral or so where is why why are these lines being blurred about linkedin social media strategies and actually what a personal brand is um because social media is just like the very obvious and very popular way of distributing a personal brand right now like in the last 10 years personal branding all of it is not anything new like you go back decades in the majority of walks of like those elements and pillars of popular culture the fundamentals of what personal personal branding is have been evident and i was thinking about the other day where it's like there was something the new york mayor candidate and he's like visual campaign was really good and i was talking about that and i was saying like visual branding is underestimated in personal branding and if you go back to like the 60s the beatles like the sergeant pepper's album cover looks like the album sounds and music has understood always like the fundamentals that exist in personal branding like how do you create an image and a perception and a persona that sits with the music really nicely and you see like the music understands that you can't stand still you need to reinvent there's like a great image of David Bowie and it's like 40 versions of David Bowie and every two years is like a new version and like there's so much of personal branding in the history of the majority of things that are in popular culture but in the last 10 years social media has been the easiest way for people to do that in the past it was like radio tv magazines like like whether it was vhs or movies or whatever like different mediums and all this kind of thing and then social media comes along and it's so much like it just blows the doors wide open to whoever can go out and do it like you can do it from your bedroom and you can grow a million followers like that's the thing now and i think when that happens what people are actually looking for is like how do i make the hack happen like they associate like the fame with them getting a million followers like not why they've got a million followers so like you take music the reason why they like an artist sells becomes famous is because they've cultivated a product and a brand and it's become popular whereas now social media means that you can skip the first two yeah you don't need a product you don't need you don't need to have a clear product you don't need to have a clear brand you can just get a million followers so it's no surprise that all the advice around 20 30 40 years ago would be like take music for example an artist needs to yes they've got the songs but now we need to like turn this into a story like a brand it needs visual there needs to be the music video plays into it all this kind of thing like what persona are you what character all this kind of thing and that would be the focus to get them to sell the records whereas now you don't have to think about any of those like you just sell the records get the million followers by going like right okay this hack this one this one and you see people online like they're at the mercy of what's trending rather than being themselves and building a platform from it and i said before um about like heather elkington and um izzy and they've kind of heather elkington to me is somebody who's like she's got her followers because she's focused on product and brand and the followers have come as a result she's not really like yes of course everyone in this era is going to go how can i make this piece of copy land better in this video format and lean into this that works and that that doesn't um but the people that tend to win long term now are the ones that understand that they have to have like a clear niche they have to have like it's almost like the productization and branding of themselves and they understand that and that's what builds them an audience and then they cultivate that audience over time rather than just like focusing on trying to get followers and doing anything to go on that and i think that's that's the thing that's changed now is like people talk about to me personal branding and social media are two different elements so like the agency that i run does both we do personal and i split them out i'm like personal branding strategy and then once that's built which doesn't talk about social media and content once that's built we then build the content and social media strategy that delivers on that personal brand strategy.

32:18But I think the two have just become like this because you don't need to do a personal brand strategy to get a million followers anymore. You can just go get a million followers by following all the hacks. So yeah, I think that's why.

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33:11Ash Jones:If you know anything about Daniel Day-Lewis, you know that you don't really know much about him. he like disappears he does a film every now and again every time he does it's like oscar winning performance but it's almost like his quote-unquote personal brand precedes him because because what he's he's like i'm so good and disappear yeah yeah that kind of precedes it so just when you were saying that then it feels like maybe the missing bit sometimes in that the get rich quick thing is i've not really spent much time on the the being good getting the 10 000 hours and i'm trying to kind of put the horse first a little bit yeah yeah for sure and i think a lot of people then try to figure it out afterwards and it's like too late it's like this Suez Canal thing trying to like you it's just so hard to do and I'm seeing it now with people who've built like really big followings and then now trying to carve out like a bit more of a clearer niche and identity and it's like it's too you've lost the audience and then all of a sudden you're getting like you've got a million followers and you're getting next to no views and that looks awful so it's like you might as well delete the account and start again yeah and um really not many people know this but uh steve had a youtube channel before the diary of ceo and he deleted it they had 50 000 followers and because at the time it was like we don't think that this is gonna like what we're trying to do next this channel that we've got it's not right like you need a clean slate with it this is like almost 10 years ago now um and i think that yeah it's just very easy to i don't know it's it's the longer harder road but it's definitely the one that's worth taking more and thinking about more i just think like i always pull it back to music and it's like it's literally like a band getting famous without having a good song it's just not going to last like the music is the reason why you know you become a legacy act and in business and entrepreneurship is really really really important because unless you strike it rich early and you can retire we're still going to have to work until we're 50 55 60 65 70 and if you've met the majority of founders and entrepreneurs they're not retiring anytime time soon because they get bored so they're going to be in these careers for like take a 30 year old now is still in 30 years going to be doing something in business and entrepreneurship so it's even more crucial that you think about the long-term effects of everything that you're doing when it comes to like personal brand and your reputation and and the perception that you're leaving the people is it might win you in the short term but does it in the long term does it actually do the opposite and fuck you over in time so you've worked with some amazing people There were some big names already have been mentioned on the podcast.

36:03Ash Jones:And we've got to talk. I mean, you're wearing the hat. How did you meet Stephen Bartlett? Really, really randomly. I went to college to do a football course. As when I was like 22, I was still convinced I was going to be a Premier League football player. So I was like, I'll go do a football coaching course. And I met a guy there called Ryan. and we became friends and he was going to an event in Manchester one day and he was like oh come along and I went along to the event and then um I was outside during like one of the breaks and Steve was there he was 18 he just dropped out of university and yeah there was just like there was a group of people outside and like you could I could just tell there was something about him like the way he held court in a group of people it was like yeah and I and I that friend was like oh he knew I was trying to get into like marketing like I was doing nothing I was on JobSeeker's Lawrence at the time just kind of sitting around um and I'd decided to go to uni to study marketing and he was like oh Steve's doing something in marketing because he just dropped out and he want to start a business he's like you should talk to him so i think i spoke to him on the day and then i dropped him a message on facebook afterwards um and then he ignored that and about three weeks later i just put like the little you know the little arrow i just put two of them to be like hey the message that i sent you above um and the message is so stupid like i literally say in it um i've been told that networking is important and this is my first networking like yeah and you just get lucky in life do you know what i mean um but i remember going home to my mom and being like i met up with him maybe like a week or two later and he showed me on this like laptop do you remember when you'd like hold laptops together by sellotape because the charger wasn't working and all this kind of stuff and he showed me this idea and i was like cool i'm i'm in like i'll do anything kind of thing and i remember cycling home and saying to my mom like i don't know what there is about that guy but i'm just gonna like hang on to the back of his coat and see where it goes and yeah that was in 2012 and he had an idea for a startup at the time we kind of worked on that for a couple years and the early people of the social chain which was a business that him and Dom went on to run kind of came into the picture then like Dom came in, Dom McGregor, Cahill Berrigan, Hannah Anderson, Michael Hevam and then Social Chain formed out the back of that business and yeah from there everything just like went off.

38:56Tie it back to personal branding as a concept then so like at what point within Social Chain in that journey were you sat around a table having those conversations where you were like we should start doing this because this will mean x y and z and like were you having because it feels from from yourself and from like the conversations with steve as well it feels like that compound was always going to happen it feels like this desired state was always like no i i think it was but in the early days like he said on the podcast before like i think i saw him speak somewhere in like 2013 and i said to him like oh you should start a youtube channel and he was like no awful idea not awful idea but he just dismissed it and i think the reason why was twofold one he literally says when he's talking about this thing he was like i was worried that everyone who knew me from back home would think well you're you're a dickhead what are you doing who do you think you are like Mahatma Gandhi um so that thought kind of like held him back a bit but I think also there just wasn't a purpose for it that made sense to him at the time like Steve now and then is like so intensely business focused and the whole him doing something like that just didn't fit into that like the dots didn't connect as to why it would be useful and then social change starts and i was a like marketing director at first and my job was to like try to get the name of the agency out there into the agency world amongst brands and things like that and steve was at the same time trying to do the same job just he was going out and doing public speaking like really small things like anywhere that'd have him i remember going to like a loft in shoreditch once and there's like 15 people there and he'd talk and then 10 of the 15 people would come speak to him afterwards and that just kept happening so it was like right that's working for us every time steve goes on stage we get loads of interest in new business so we need to double that at the end of the first year it was like how do we double down on that because he's only got so much time so he can't speak all the time and he definitely like ramped up his speaking but the idea was like why don't we just take the essence of what the speaking is and do it in a way that's a lot more efficient which is like create content um and i don't know if this was why he did it but i definitely remember watching like daily v at that time and daily v was on like episode 70 or something like that and then steve started a vlog and it was kind of like the way that i saw it was like nobody in the country is doing that that no in the uk is doing that right now that gary vanichuk's doing over there so we could do something in that world and it started off very like almost like a side project the day would finish in social chain it gets like midnight and then we just film a couple of videos in the office till like three in the morning and there's like old vlogs from social chain it's like it'll say like the time stamp like 3 a.m tuesday the 14th of august and it'd be like we just just finished wrapping a video in the office like and that's how it was for like six months just like tacked on to the end of the day and then we put those out they started to get traction and then it just made sense as like a but to me it was a social chain marketing initiative that's why it made sense and that's why it became part of his it went from being his after midnight to then becoming part of his day is because it made sense all of a sudden from business point of view like okay now I know why I do this stuff because it's really helping us grow the business and get awareness and we can turn that into clients and opportunity so when I stopped working with Steve is a really interesting point in time in that there's almost a couple of different evolutions of Steve as a his personal brand and after kind of came like the podcast started when I was there but it was a bit of like a it wasn't anything near what it was now when jack sylvester came in it became like everything you see now is jack sylvester onwards and dragon's den kind of came like a year or two after i left so it's like the foundations from what we were doing when i was there definitely led into that evolution that went beyond social chain but to me it was all about create an opportunity for social change through steve and even now i think in my linkedin bio it says on my experience like um telling the story of one of the fastest growing social media agencies through the eyes of its ceo so you can see like i didn't see it as making somebody famous and i didn't know that a dragon's den would open up or he'd go i thought the podcast was a great idea but i could never in a million years would have guessed it'd be like what it is now um and that's not where it started either like it's evolved it was very much like it was a bit more businessy at first and then it started to evolve in themes and things like that so my understanding of personal branding was always about leveraging an individual to help a business achieve what it's trying to achieve like my kpi was make social chain famous for me the easiest way to do that was through steve but that works because steve is steve and i imagine yeah you could find lots and lots of business owners who aren't steve and actually if you put them in front of a camera and i know that probably when steve started it wasn't natural but there are some people that are just yeah he had it yeah it's not my wheelhouse it's not something i want to touch and some people say i don't want the limelight i just want to build the biggest business in the world and grow that so you've got this thing of and we see all the time on linkedin of like the the founders and the people that run the companies usually have more followers more brand recognition than the actual brand but some people don't want that so if you are trying to grow your brand and you're not you don't want this like clear box thinking where i want everyone to see me how how do you go about like building the brand of the company whilst maybe being the puppeteer um i think like i'm starting to see it more now where people that would never have like engaged us three four years ago now are and it's typically because the business is demanding them to do that so it'll be like we're going for an ipo in the next 18 months and there's this really i'd never i'm not one of those people that's like the data says this but if you look at the reason why investors back companies and how much money they put in it's like heavily outweighed if the founder has like a strong storytelling aspect for the company like that the amount they back those kind of things is just like insanely heavily weighted over somebody who doesn't have that so you're starting to see now or at least we are in conversations that i've had in the last 18 months where they'd never have done this before they weren't that type of person but the business is finding it's really useful for them for something that they're going for and they're they i think what's happening is there's a separation between what they think personal brand is and what it can be in a like business driving tactic and initiative and people are starting to go right okay i'll drop the idea of what i thought it was and i'll just do it I can get behind it for this reason.

46:40So I think if you're at the top of a business, there's something within the realm of personal branding that you can leverage to support the company achieving the objectives that it's got in some way, shape or form. I used to be of the opinion that personal branding isn't for everyone. And when I left social chain, I wasn't getting into personal branding because I thought, well, I've not got Steve now. And he was great. so how am i going to find another stephen bartler so i wasn't actually going to do personal branding when i left and i've come round on that idea of like i was very much it's for some people and it's not for others i think it is for everyone that's leading a business it's just how you do it has to look different and what it's driving and therefore like the approach that you take is

47:26Ash Jones:very different as that it evolves so let's say like in our business that me and jack run our business with an operations director all three of us have been best mates since we were like 15 and i think he's probably the the third jonas brother we call him but he's probably someone who's like not posting on linkedin not out there very much but he's still very much at the core of the business we couldn't do without him is that someone that because he's in leadership we should be then be saying come on mate you need to be out there as well oh god i'm so tired i've just been talking to qualified prospects all day without any wait time.

48:02How have you been doing it? Because I've been cold calling people on my mobile and I reckon I've spoke to one person.

48:07Ash Jones:No, no, no. Stop that right now and use Nooks.ai. Why? What does Nooks do? It finds me the right people to call and it calls them and it connects with them over and over and over again. So you're saying it's Nooks.ai and I can just be speaking to qualified decision makers all the time? No other better connection, right? Wow, Nooks.ai. yeah because like every great boy band needs its jason orange and people really like jason orange yeah yeah yeah like not everyone loved gary like gary and robbie people like mark and who's it mark jason sorry yeah howard howard sorry howard and people really ended up liking like jason or howard and it was the less popular choice but in there was something in that as well it's like and again i'm talking about music all the time but it just helps it make sense and i think like even with the most behind the scenes leader there's still something in what they do that can help the business and people will like like resonate with them in some way um so yeah i think if you're in that it's the the only thing is just like how do you actually tactically execute on that is like just be aware like some people are great on camera some people are not and if they are on camera it's actually counterproductive and just like you've just got to have an honest conversation like the like jason and howard weren't doing lead vocals they would barely even probably i think i watched a documentary about boyzone it was like some of them didn't even sing on the records because they were like you're this louis walsh was like you're the same you're the lead you're doing this job you're doing this job um but they all like ronan keating couldn't of his solo career was not as big as boyzone because you need the band yeah um and there's something in that like a band is public facing and there's different characters doing different things for different reasons people resonate with them in different ways and i see it with like me and cloud in our team like people connect with her in ways that will never connect with me and how she goes about it is different to how i go about it and we have different ideas on what to do and sometimes that's we agree and sometimes we don't agree but both of us can help great influence and achieve what he's trying to do in ways that the other can't and it's just like i do think there is an element of like there's things in leadership that you don't like doing this has to be one of them in like the modern world kind of thing because i i'd love for someone to convince me that it's not useful like there's something that you can find like take okay we're trying to hire 10 people in the next two months right okay well you go talk about why we're a great place to work and things like that you do something that someone else isn't like just make it strategic into what we're trying to do and all of a sudden it'll help that's a great show you can have that chat with ben it's actually um stephen kenwright uh that kind of outlined to me this idea of like share a voice within a brand and look at all the things that your company is trying to achieve strategic like strategic objectives and what's your share of voice in each of them like what are you doing as a brand to try to achieve those objectives like publicly whether in your marketing in this in personal brand whatever and a lot of the time I find that especially in the work that we do a brand might be doing a lot from their consumer point but all the non-consumer bits and the actual like business buildy bits they have very little share of voice as a brand so the immediately i'm like well you could get a hundred thousand impressions in the next month on this aspect that you're not doing anything around right now and you can like own share of voice through the founder there and they're like i didn't think of that yeah and it's again it's just how you look at it a lot of people are turned off by the idea of the word personal brand and when we work with booking they had to internally pitch it as a thing and they took it internally at first and kind of pitched it as like a personal branding program not much uptake and then they just changed the title to leadership advocacy program there's a lot more uptake for it and it's because it's the idea of like i'm not a brand i don't want to be famous i'm not comfortable in putting myself out there it's like you associate the word and what it's doing with like an influencer type thing which i completely get and is again there's like personal brand there's different ways it can be done and different uses and all that kind of thing but i think a lot of the understanding of it still sits in the more vanity fame kind of thing and fame's not a welcome word within business which i don't agree with at all like fame is an unbelievable thing if it's contextual like you want to be the most famous like i i want great influence to be the most famous personal branding agency but i want it to be famous for being a personal branding agency i don't want it to be famous for being something that it's not like that's no use to me but it being famous for delivering great work on personal branding and working with the best people in the world on doing that and having the best people in the team for doing that give me that fame all day long because it makes my job 10 times easier rory sutherland said something similar we had him on about advertising we're talking about advertising hacks and who's got the best thing and in the end he said the easiest thing if you're advertising something is to try and be famous if you're famous for the thing that you offer yeah it will solve all your advertising you don't spend any money on advertising then because you're just famous for it yeah um so we've had a lot of people on that are from social chain now and from flight flight story as well yeah and i think one of the social chains like paypal mafia yeah definitely the amount of businesses that have sprung up but the thing you have in common is there's always the thread of like storytelling being so critical and like all these clear parts of storytelling obviously for you you're the person who's kind of behind the scenes making that story kind of come to life i imagine there's people listening now who are probably at the point of like okay i'm inspired i'm on the roller coaster now but they probably need that set of questions to ask themselves to find what their story is so what do you think is the starting point of the things people could be asking in the car on the tube now to start thinking about that story um i think it's like understanding what you want to like if you are going to put yourself out there what type of persona do you want to have like i don't lean into the storytelling aspect like if you look at steve for example especially in the early days of what he was doing a lot of it was like his backstory and the story of what he was doing with social chain and bringing the story of everyone at social chain these like kids that dropped out that were like running the internet behind the scenes like university dropout so there was so much storytelling and what we were doing whereas like for me i've never really i don't really talk about social chain much i tend to just like i away from like Like if I'm sat in the office, I'm a nightmare for just like openly analyzing and thinking and being like, oh, what do you think of this?

55:39So it's like naturally just in my wheelhouse to kind of like the thought leadership side really resonated with me where it's like, okay, I like genuinely talking about personal branding and my thinking on it and any like theories that I have, whatever it is. So that's what I lean into more. and i actually did this like there's a tool that i've just been given access to and it like put your linkedin profile in it kind of pulls out a strategy and it's like one of the areas that you could do more in is it'd be a bit more personal a bit more storytelling i'm like i know i could and there's everything's there but i'm just not that like it's not really for me so i think it's like first and foremost no like don't try to force yourself into doing something that isn't you because you think that you should be doing it instead figure out which bit because there's a number of different routes that you could take like you can be the person who's just like a commentator on what's happening and you see this within marketing like people are commenting on like marketing campaigns and brands rebrands and things like this and they just chip in their two cents or you can be like somebody who puts your thoughts and ideas out into the world you can be the person who's just like documenting what they're doing you can be the person who tells the story of that like there's so many different avenues that you could take is understanding which one is most fitting to you like it's so you've got to go through a process of like building confidence and imposter syndrome so much with this stuff that if something's outside your wheelhouse it's going to make it 10 times more difficult to go through that process and most people fall off because it gets daunting or they're like like i've still now like five five six seven years into great influence where i'm like i have to go speak and i'm like but the thing that gets me through that moment is like i know what i'm talking about and i'm only trying to go on stage and impart some kind of insight on the work that i do i'm not going on there to sell my story i'm not going up there to talk about anything other than the thing that i do 24 7 so that kind of eases the like confidence barriers and imposter syndrome aspect of it over time you're like okay i can do this i can do this i can do this and the first few phases of doing it is just getting the confidence to actually know that you're able to do it because it's very daunting to put yourself out there so yeah that'd be my first port call is like look at the different avenues of what you could do maybe the archetype of of personal branding that you could lean into whether it's like thought leader commentator storyteller documenter which one sits easiest with you that doesn't kind of yeah make you crease up a little and lean into that and it's like get the easy wins build up the confidence because i don't think it's natural like there's some people it's really natural too but for the vast majority of people it's not something that comes natural and they have to build it over time um yeah and then the other thing i always keep in mind is like i've had the fortune of seeing people at the like high level whether it's like steve or gary be out of their comfort zone with this stuff with certain things and i'm like if you're still out your comfort zone in doing this but you just do it anyway then it's almost like it just eases my whenever i'm speaking or doing something or whatever it's just like ah i'm not the only one that feels this and i can just it's like coping mechanism knowing that even the best people still to this day find it daunting to put themselves out there it's not a normal thing ash i've really enjoyed this conversation thank you so so much for joining us that's what everyone says time's life if people have listened to this whole conversation what what's one question that you could leave them with that they should ask themselves um would what you're trying to achieve in the next 12 months be easier through doing this and if it is then you've got to make the time to do it i think putting in the time to do it is where most people struggle because there's so much for us all to do like my to-do list is like 20 tasks long for today where do i fit this in and it's it really is like a case of priorities and And unfortunately, the reward is like four, five, six, seven, eight years in.

1:00:03So, yeah, prioritize it, find the time. Beautiful. Thank you so, so much, Ash. If people want to find you, work with you, how can they go about that? I'm on Instagram, underscore Ashley B. Jones, or LinkedIn, Ash Jones, or our website is greatinfluence.com. Thank you so much. Thank you.

1:00:26Thank you.