In this enlightening episode, Isaac Mashman delves deep into the unique finds at thrift shops and the power of intuition in an entrepreneurial journey. Join host Phil Better as they explore how even a modest purchase can symbolize entrepreneurial wisdom and share actionable insights that will inspire you to invest in yourself.
Wondering how to build your personal brand without needing to be ultra-successful first? Curious about the impact of telling your story authentically on social media? Isaac Mashman answers these questions, providing valuable advice on developing your intuition and understanding its significance in both personal and professional realms.
How can context transform the interprets meanings of classic texts like "The Prince"? What advice would Isaac give his 10-year-old self about trusting one's gut instinct? Listen in to uncover profound responses that illuminate the art of entrepreneurship and personal growth.
Tune in for a particularly inspirational moment toward the end, where Isaac shares a heartfelt message on living up to one's full potential. Don't miss out on this engaging episode of Invest In Yourself: the Digital Entrepreneur Podcast, and be sure to connect with Isaac Mashman for further insights!
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Key Takeaways:
- Thrift Shop Finds: Even modest investments in unexpected places can lead to significant returns.
- Importance of Context: Understand the background of stories, like those in "The Prince," to apply lessons effectively.
- Trust Your Intuition: Follow your gut instincts in personal and professional decisions.
- Start Building Your Brand Now: You don’t need perfection; authenticity and consistency matter more.
- Benefits of Podcasting: Establish credibility, network, and create valuable content through podcasting.
- Personal Branding: Personal brands can generate incomes, raise awareness for causes, or be a form of self-expression.
Connect with Isaac Mashman:
Website: https://isaacmashman.com
Facebook: https://facebook.com/isaacmashmanofficial
Instagram: @isaacmashman
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**Credits:**
**Host: Phil Better**
- Instagram: [@PodcastMogul]
- LinkedIn: [Phil Better]
- Website: [https://www.Philbetterinc.com]
**Executive Producer: Phil Better**
- Instagram: [@PodcastMogul]
- Website: [https://www.Philbetterinc.com]
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**About Us:**
Embark on a transformative journey with "Invest In Yourself: The Digital Entrepreneur Podcast," an illustrious and award-winning series tailored for dreamers trapped in the corporate grind. Hosted by the dynamic Podcast Mogul Phil Better, this podcast serves as a guiding light for ambitious millennials yearning to break free from the corporate shackles and rediscover the liberating dreams of their childhood.
Phil Better engages in insightful conversations with Digital Entrepreneurs hailing from diverse corners of the globe and various industries. Tune in as they unravel the secrets of successful entrepreneurship and delve into the art of self-investment. Uncover the essential skills, mindset shifts, and strategies to forge your path to financial freedom and fulfillment.
If you're a 30-year-old visionary seeking an escape from the corporate maze, longing for the tranquil life promised in your youth, this podcast is your compass. Join us as we explore the untapped possibilities at your fingertips, and let the stories of thriving entrepreneurs inspire you to carve out your destiny. It's time to break free, invest in yourself, and turn those childhood dreams into a reality. Welcome to a world where your aspirations take center stage.
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(upbeat music) - Welcome to Invest in Yourself, the Digital Entrepreneur Podcast. Join the podcast, Murgis Phil Better, as he interviews success for Entrepreneur that make their living in the digital world. Now, let's join your host, Phil Better, and your special guest. Today on Invest in Yourself, the Digital Entrepreneur Podcast. - Welcome back to another exciting episode of Invest in Yourself, the Digital Entrepreneur Podcast. I'm, of course, your host with Most Phil Better, and today we have a guest whose multifaceted career and passion for personal branding will leave you inspired and motivated. Our guest today is a true Renaissance man in the world of business and personal development. He's a businessman author, creator, podcast host, private investor, and, of course, a speaker. He's best known for his groundbreaking work in personal branding and is the founder of Mashman Ventures, a leading public relations firm that helps individuals and businesses enhance their public image and influence. In addition to his work at Mashman Ventures, he is an active investor through his business Mashable Properties and Mashman Investments. He is also the author of the insightful book, Personal Branding, a Manifesto on Fame and Influence, which has garnered attention for its profound insights and into building a powerful personal brand. His expertise just doesn't stop there. As a renowned podcast host and guest, he shares his wealth of knowledge and expertise with ambitious audiences across the world, his ability to articulate complex ideas in accessible and engaging manners has made him a sought-after voice in the industry. Today, he will share his journey, the principles of effective personal branding and actionable advice to have on how to leverage your inequalities to achieve fame and influence. Whether you're looking to build a personal brand, enhance your business strategies or simply gain inspiration from a seasoned entrepreneur, this episode is gonna be packed with valuable insight. So please, put your hands together, warm up those earlobes 'cause we have Isaac Mashman on the podcast. Isaac, thank you so much for being here. - Phil, man, honored. And, man, I musta sent you the wrong media kit. Mashman Ventures is a thing of the past. - Oh my God. - I know. No, it's Mashman Consulting Group. Gotta disclose that ahead of time. I dissolved Mashman Ventures a couple months ago now and launched a brand new venture out of Little Rock, Arkansas Mashman Consulting Group. So similar vision, but it's a consulting firm. - I love it, I love it. Well, it must've been just before you consolidate when you sign. - Yeah. - That's probably the reason. But it doesn't matter. You're here now Mashable Consulting. It's gonna be great. I'm gonna love it. I wanna learn a bit about why you decided to consolidate, change it after the most shutdown. But we're gonna start with the first question. I always ask, why did you get into the world of entrepreneurship? What was it that sparked the decision to show off corporate life or the traditional path and go and create your own path? - Yeah, well, I mean, I suppose a good explanation to that would be going and taking you back to how I was raised and my upbringing. So I'm originally from Jacksonville, Florida, single parent household, didn't meet my biological father and have a relationship with him until I was already an adult. And it was very, I would say, lower end middle class, upper end poverty line. My mom worked fast food jobs. She was way overqualified for, in my opinion, and just looking at the fact sheet, way over qualified. But growing up, I was raised with that idea of go to school, get good grades, go to college. And I did exactly that in terms of I was a straight A student. I'm not one of those DRF entrepreneurs like Gary V. Now, I was top 10 of my class graduated with a 4.4 weighted GPA. But in my senior year, I'm thinking to myself, my mom went back and got her master's degree and hasn't put it to use yet. And I don't want to spend the next two years of my life doing a bunch of prerequisites, which I've already taken in high school, like biology and algebra. Why do I need that for business? And it's not that I couldn't learn it or that it would be difficult. It was just, why would I take two years out of my life to do this and go to college and get involved with a bunch of things that I probably shouldn't get involved with? And in my senior year, I saw these younger guys and I dabbled in entrepreneurship before. I had a long business over a couple summers, related to law firm as a client, worked with Boy Scout leaders to do their lawnwork and stuff to afford summer camps. Like, that was okay. I wasn't opposed to that hard work and I scoured the entire neighborhood with flyers on my bike several early Saturday morning just dropping off flyers. So it was cool. But at the same point, my senior year, I see these younger people that were slightly older than me, but they were involved with the industry of network marketing. And then I kind of stumbled on Gary Vaynerchuk and then I stumbled into the entrepreneur space and I saw this young guy and so I created an Instagram page and started to try to do that influencer kind of perspective. And man, long story short, over the past six years, it's been this journey of seeking clarity, going from business to business to business until in 2020 when I realized that I had a knack for personal branding and I became that go-to guy. But to answer your question, I wanted the freedom and flexibility to do what I wanted and the opportunity to scale. 'Cause when you're working a corporate job, you are pretty much limited in what you're going to make and why would you take 20 years out of your life to get a corner office when you could be a business owner and you know, just buy it, you know, or at least. And that's basically my perspective on, you know, the corporate versus entrepreneur thing, don't give me wrong, corporate is great. I think that it offers a lot of benefits us entrepreneurs don't have like, what's a 401k match? I don't know. You know, here we go though. - I love it. Like most entrepreneurs, it was the freedom to decide and I love how you just said, why work 20 years to get a corporate office, a corner office in corporate world when you can just go out and buy the corner office? Let's start there and just work your way up into the bigger offices. You mentioned you started little side hustles, if you will, when you're younger, you're a little entrepreneurial ventures, you know, cutting lawns and that. What was the first big client that you had? - Client that you got when you decided to go full force into the world of personal branding and that. - Well, the first money I ever made online was in 2017 when I was still in high school and I had a clothing line that I was launching at the beginning of the year called Success before Rest of Parallel. I still have some of the hoodies and it was just a drop shipping method using Teespring and I had a friend make a logo and then I turned it into these motivational phrases, very cliche that I look back and I cringe but I made the first $5 sale and I logged into the dashboard. I was like somebody that I've never talked to just bought my stuff. That's pretty cool. But it was in 2019 when I made my first $1,000 client which I think really set the stage for future things and I'm still great friends with him. I consider him a mentor. He's a close personal friend of mine now today and it was to help manage his podcast and get it up off the ground. And it was right before I was planning on going over to France for a trip and that $1,000 came in and I'm thinking to myself, "Holy hell man, when I was working in Publix "or working at doing some barbecue joint prep in the back, "I had to work four weeks to make that kind of money "and now I just got paid $1,000 "and it'll take me 10 hours of my time "but this is really cool." And that breaking point, really, number one I asked and number two I was like, I looked at other people what they were charging for similar service and for some reason 1,000 just felt comfortable but still it was a reach. And as soon as that closed and got the ball roll and I was like, "Man, the opportunities are endless here." And before then I was doing those small coaching gigs, $100, not coaching in terms of let me be your life coach but social media and just helping people in minor ways. And over the time and as time developed, I got better and better with what my offering was and what I wanted to do. And eventually I realized I didn't wanna do any done for you services, I absolutely abhor that. So hence I'm in the consulting world. - I like that. And the reason you just like the done for you services 'cause it takes more time away from you, right? And you're overhead 'cause you have to, if you don't do it, you have to hire someone to do it for you and that means less income coming in. When did you hire your first person? - That was-- - Go ahead, sorry. - No, it was just to, the free up your time was the finish of the question but when was the first time you hired someone? - Well in Mashman Ventures, when I was first building the team out, I wanted to make sure that I did it in a way that would reduce overhead for me. So rather than hiring for, hey, this is $1,000 every single month paying you, it was commission based off of clients that were coming in, based off in need. So it was effectively white label, which is a really easy overhead introduction into the world of business. If you wanna expand your team, bring on an independent contractors, align their success with your own success and have them work on commission basis while offering them training and whatever service you might be providing so they get the benefit of, hey, if you have help, need help with your personal brand, you could come to me and I can help you free of charge. And what I need you to do is offer your services on a commission basis to people that I bring you. Then I brought on my chief consultant who's actually coming on board as the COO for Mashman Consulting Group in the next couple of months, Eric Chow as a consultant. And I took some of the best aspects of network marketing and the terms of building not a hierarchical structure based off of recruitment, but based off of performance. And so I brought him on, I trained him over the span of a summer and then I had him go out and close his own clients of the firm. And so as he was working with his own business owners and his own clientele, the firm would get a cut of that. And then he was also making much more money than he would possibly be able to make when he was tutoring or, you know, when he was first getting started. And so it was really a huge leap of faith, but it was something that, you know, if I'm thinking about my long-term vision here, having 500 consultants and going from a corner office to eventually owning an entire floor, like that's what it's required. And, you know, you don't have to necessarily hire somebody on a recurring basis to save yourself time. You could hire somebody just to edit your videos using Fiverr or somebody in your network. You could hire somebody, you know, for a couple hundred bucks to help you with your taxes. That's a form of delegation, right? That needs to be done. - That's very true. I love that. That even pointing out that someone doing your taxes is another form of delegation. 'Cause most people don't think of it as a form of delegation and it works for, yeah, it works for you if you're an entrepreneur or not. 'Cause you had someone in your taxes, you're delegating a task and you're not either able to do, you know, why is it enough to do? Or it's not worth your time to learn all the intricates of how to, you know, save you the money in the taxes. Why was it personal branding? What was it about personal branding that called to you, that like called to your core? - It was, I didn't want to do something that everybody else was doing. - And that's really the main answer here. Because in 2020, I saw that every social media agency, the Tai Loba Aziz, right, the courses, the SMMA bros, they were all focusing on the business. What about the business owner, right? And I viewed that as this blue ocean market opportunity to move in because there were other people in the personal branding space, but it was very limited in this sense of, a lot of times you work with a personal brand coach or consultant, they'll only focus on social media and they won't factor in the macro approach of, let's talk about your book, your podcast, your public speaking, your Google presence and your social media and your in-person relationships and your in-person opportunities and how you can leverage your personal brand to grow your business and why you're even growing it in the first place. And so rather than taking this very short-sighted approach, I wanted to work with people on a bunch of different spectrums. And it's also a lot of fun because I'm not just working with doctors or dentists, I'm working with business owners, podcasters, authors, entertainers, executives. And eventually I would like to get into a little bit of that corporate white collar traditional thing to where I can work with an executive of Coca-Cola or Steven's Ink, like the building that I have in the background, this is Regions, but Steven's is right there. And being able to say, hey, this is how you as a corporate executive can help shape the image of your company in a positive manner and grow sales and also get benefits of your own, like your own engagements, your own things that are outside of your career. - I love that. And I want to, since you're in the personal branding space and you've been an entrepreneur for a while, have you noticed a change in the consumers approach them wanting to be less see this? 'Cause we both grew up with the big corporate overlords, if you will, with their faceless, we don't know who they are. And then you started getting like the Elon Musk 'cause in the Bill Gates then those people, do you find consumers are more loyal? If you will, I don't want to really say loyal because loyalty today is changing, but do you find that they feel consumers feel more connected to a brand when there is this personal face to it? - Absolutely. And if you're talking about brand loyalty, it's not like the '50s or '60s where grandparents use the same kind of toothpaste until the day they died, or they drink the same Folger's cup of coffee or Maxwell's house coffee until the day they died. We don't have that brand loyalty today. And a couple, if we think about those early days, even I've read articles from like Napoleon Hill or Edward Bernays and propaganda and they get hit with 500 marketing messages a day, well now it's more like 5,000, right? And you think about that influx of information and your brain is shifting through and making all these different decisions and just the other day I saw a car in front of me and it was a truck, small business here and the license plate was G garage, right? Great garages. And the other day when we were driving my fiance said, hey, isn't that from the truck, right? The license plate was G garage is like, isn't that the same company? I was like, absolutely, like that's such a simple form of branding, you know, a simple form of marketing. And thinking about the lack of brand loyalty today, I believe that companies need to really put a face to the brand so there can be an emotional connection 'cause the brands struggle to have that emotional tie. And you think about why somebody would want to hire a CEO that is well known in a certain avenue I'm thinking about the Chipotle CEO, right? Who was recently poached and as soon as he was poached the stock price shot up and why is that? Because of that person's personal brand they knew that this CEO would be able to do something exceptional for the company, hence the market views it in a favorable sense and increases the valuation of the company. And so people are searching on a deep level to connect deeper than just a, okay, this is, let's say, Trader Joe's, but now imagine the Trader Joe's CEO comes on and talks about how he worked from being a bad clerk to, you know, becoming that CEO or sharing stories like storytelling is such an effective way to establish long-term relationships rather than short-form sales. - I love that. I kind of want to touch on, since you brought up storytelling which is something very important because we are a society of storytellers, right? From the early days around the campfire when we're in Neanderthals, if you will, sharing the history all the way to today telling stories about our past and that. How can a business owner, let's say they're unable to afford your services right away, how can they start to bring in aspects of storytelling to tell their brand story or their personal branding? Well, you do not have to have an credibility or authority or expertise to build your personal brand. This is huge. Go back and re-listen to that. You do not need credibility, authority or expertise to build out your personal brand. You don't. You have been building your personal brand from the moment you were born. You went through school, you were the class clown, you were the teacher's pet, you went to college, you had your group of friends, you were the frat bro or you were the student who was in the library nonstop. You go into your career, you build those relationships, you get hired based off your personal brand, your resume is effectively your personal brand speaking for you on a piece of paper, albeit very impersonal. And so people are really wanting to connect with individuals, I saw a post the other day from a realtor and she's like, how much I made in so far as a realtor in 2024, she's like 23 years old, she's like January 10,000, February zero, March 8,000. And then she's like April zero, right? And so she showed that and I went to the comment section, it was the most wholesome comment section I've ever seen 'cause it was like, thank you so much for being transparent. She's not going and marketing yourself as some, I am the number one realtor, she's saying that I am starting out in real estate and this is what I'm making, these are the highs, these are the lows, people like that. Now you could argue and say that's authentic, right? You're really just showcasing yourself without having to fabricate some lie. And so whether or not you're starting out, you could showcase, hey, day one of launching a podcast, day two of launching a podcast, day three of launching a business. And you could take people along for that ride because there were times filled where when I was starting out and I didn't have a firm business that I was committing to, I jumped from business to business to business over the span of a couple of years trying to figure out what the hell I wanted to build. And it didn't matter what business I was building, people were still supporting me because they were supporting Isaac, you're supporting me. And so now as a going into my quotes executive era, whatever you wanna call it, right? That's just like a new phase. People have really latched on and they're like, wow, I've seen him go from going and sleeping on the floor in California to now getting an office or to doing these engagements or to launching a book and doing these, people want to support you. And I had a call or I had a message earlier today from somebody in sales and he's gonna become a client of mine. And I was like, when was the last time he put out a call to action and you shared a story because people are wanting to work with you, they just don't know how, they don't know how to get started. And so whether you're starting out as an entrepreneur or making a career change or wanting to launch a podcast or write a book, start putting yourself out there and creating content. Whether that be filming a 30 second short vertical video and using some simple software to edit it, put it out there, showcase a little bit of your story and your journey, your struggles and people will begin to watch you and over time become more familiar with you and that's the law of familiarity. Eventually they'll support you. - I love that. And I love how you're saying it doesn't have to be polished. It doesn't have to be perfect. It just needs to show that you're starting 'cause everybody has to know, 'cause everybody, I know from a podcasting point of view 'cause we both are in this podcasting and I wanna touch upon your future podcast that you alluded to, that you're launching, that everybody needs to be perfect. They need to have the $100 camera, the $3,000 microphone and have to be like the Joe Rogans or the diary of a CEO when they're starting, when you can just literally start, like I started just on Zoom with Zoom and it was just audio based and now we have the video coming out with it and we're looking a little nicer now. But yeah, I love how you're saying, like just start. It doesn't have to be perfect. It just, you just need to show your start and you like the real estate person, some months you're gonna be good, some months you're gonna be bad but people are gonna love falling and they're gonna fall in love with you and wanna be supportive of you and it's very true. There's a realtor friend of mine that I'm like, when I buy my house, I'm going to them because I followed their journey from starting as a standup comic to being a realtor and I wanna support them. That's how you build that brand loyalty. I love it and just realizing it connects in my head. I wanna get maybe a, before we jump into your podcast, a bit of a personal reflection on your journey so far as a businessman author, podcast host now as an executive. If you will, has there been any pivotal moments or challenges that have significantly shaped your approach to the personal branding business? I would say finding the business model is a very big one and I feel like this is a discussion we should talk about because my business model went through a lot of different iterations and having a service such as consulting, you can charge in a variety of ways. You can charge by the hour, you can charge by retainer, you can charge per session, right? And so I've tried all three. I tried the charge per hour but then you're basically still working for the clock. What's the point, you know, it's a measurement there and then it creates the concern of, oh, is he withholding information to charge another session, right? The second is retainer but then you have the client's commitment. So if you are giving somebody a list of things to do, homework, for example, and they don't get it done but you have another session scheduled, are they really getting the maximum value if they're not fulfilling what they need to do? No. And then plus you have issues when it comes to client expectations and managing that in an ethical way. That is one of the biggest things, really setting the expectation for the clients and I had a situation two years ago with a client and he made my life complete hell because he paid for an entire year's worth of service, send $5,000 on Christmas day and then two months later wanted a full refund practically. And I was like, what in the world, you have not even recorded one video talking about the difference between a warranty and a special warranty deed which is the easiest thing you could discuss on real estate and you haven't even done that and you're thinking that you can go ahead and get featured on Forbes? How can I represent you if you're not representing yourself? And he's like, I want a $8,000 thing and then I was like, at that moment, I'm never doing retainers again. Absolutely no, absolutely not. So I will charge per session if they could purchase multiple sessions in advance. That's perfectly fine, I'm okay with that. But that was one of the biggest things when it came to ironing out my services and what I was offering. And then when it comes to consulting a client and working with them one on one, making it clear that I'm not going to hold their hand every step of the way and be there while they go in and log into the dashboard or log into their social media. I can be that personable if you need me to but I am going to set you up with everything you need to where you can get these results yourself and you could view me as that, I suppose that spotter in the gym that can lift you up and lift that weight and make sure that you're doing things in a proper form so you're not messing up your back in the deadlift. Like that is my job as a consultant and anybody else who's working for MCG and those were some of the biggest, most pivotal moments in terms of getting the structure for what I was offering. And then I've also seen some clients wanting to go viral and not even creating content or wanting to go viral and not invest in editing, right? Like or not invest in just those small little things that just like you said a couple of minutes ago you realized that all of these things are interlooped and interwoven. That really is your personal brand at the end of the day from your podcast, from your book to your business to your interests, right? If we split the word personal brand in two you have personal year and brand here. The personal side is oftentimes overlooked. People talk about, hey, how are you doing? Oh, my job's stressing me out. They're not even talking about how they're doing. They're talking about their career. When people wanna talk about you. - Very true. And it just like logged, just like clicked in my head that like 90% of the conversations when you say how you're doing, they always come up their career, their business, their job and not what, how they're doing. They could be doing perfectly fine but because of their job overwhelming them and they create the identity that is their job or their career, they lose out who they are. And that's a huge factor that we need to fix in the society. I'm wondering with your podcast, first of all, what's your podcast like gonna be named? I wanna get into the nuance, the niche of your podcast. So what made you wanna redo a podcast, relaunch another podcast after you had this example already? - Well, I hadn't chased the vision with Isaac Mashman which I launched when I was still in that cliche hustle bro phase, right? I can honestly look back on that and cringe but it progressively improves as I went and recorded more episodes. The first 30 were different from the last 30 and that was great and podcasting is a tool that allows you to connect number one with guests and people who might be out of reach because now you're offering them a platform in a stage to speak and that boosts your own credibility. Then it also offers you an opportunity to talk about subjects that can boost your individual credibility such as, hey, let me talk about personal branding on this episode or public relations or let me share a story. And so it's a very personable way to connect with your audience and then you could take that audio and that video and promote it for social media content and break that down. It's great from a visibility standpoint in Google. The SEO is very strong. You could take those transcripts, AI tools or making transcripts really easy to get now rather than logging the words yourself. Take those transcripts, turn them into long form blog posts. Great. So you have like three or four different ways of using podcasting right there just within the past 60 seconds. And I dissolved, I dissolved. I stopped recording episodes for Chase the Vision in June of 2022 after crossing 100 episodes because I felt like it was cliche. And that was when I entered into the stage of my own life where I'm really figuring out what's next for me and how can I go from being that entrepreneur online to, no, I am business owner, consultant, executive, public figure, next level, next, everything. And it took me a little bit of time to discover what that would be. And so I'm really excited to announce that before the end of this year I'm launching my new show call it excessive with Isaac Mashman. And this is almost a playoff of my record label that I was building at one point called excess records. And I stopped doing that venture after I left California, obviously, and that's what led into Mashman ventures. But the idea of the show is talking with people who had to do something that others would call excessive to achieve success. And not just in the business space, but in the celebrity space and the artists to music space. Also in the business space, yes, of course, talking about, hey, what were the risks? What were the leaps of faith? What were the challenges? What were the things that you did that people around you were like, man, that's so excessive. Do you really need to do that? Do you really need to work that hard? Do you really need to post all of that content? You know, just those different things. Do you really need to be that aggressive with your lifestyle and having the conversation around the two masks, right? The cover art of the show is going to have three faces. I'm going to be in the front. And then I have a photo of me wearing a mask. And then I have a photo of me smoking a cigar on the other because we have these different masks that we showcase of like, hey, this is the mask I want you to see versus this is me, and this is what I'm building and kind of stepping into that era, stepping into that aura, so to speak. And so I'm really excited for the show and I'm also going to be doing short monologues where I share more personal stories and using it as a way to showcase that entertaining side of me. That isn't really easy to reflect all the time on social media because you create the content with the purpose of educating and motivating, but what about the person, man, the interests, the things that make me me? I love that. I'm curious, because your podcast is going to be on what people do to the excess, to get to where they are, what's something that you or someone has said to you that it's excessive that you did to get to the level you are today, to be in that next stage of your career as an entrepreneur and to be becoming the business owner executive? - Oh, man, willing to do the small things that people wouldn't be willing to do. I can think of several of those off the top of my head from leaving a business card in a Barnes and Noble in Los Angeles. I left my business cards in Gary Vaynerchuk's book in Grant Cardone and everybody else, and somebody bought a book a couple of weeks later, I got a message on Instagram saying, "Hey, I bought your book and I found your card," right? Pretty cool. And those different minor tasks from, you know, I'm thinking about when you fill out a profile on social media, a lot of times you will leave a space or a period or a comma or something where it shouldn't be. And you have to be very detail oriented when building out your personal brand and be willing to make it look polished and perfect. You won't have it automatically. Like, I don't expect anybody listening here to have like the perfect marketing message, but being willing to take those extra steps to polish things in time, that in of itself could be considered excessive or wearing your own merchandise and never wearing another person's brand, right? That's big. You could say that's excessive. Hey, you know, like this shirt right here might have a little logo on it, but I'm covering it up for the interview, right? And when I get my own hoodies made for MCG, I'm not gonna be wearing Nike hoodies or Reebok hoodies. I'm gonna be wearing MCG hoodies everywhere I go. It doesn't matter if I'm going out in public for a quick dinner. It doesn't matter if I'm going to the office. I'm gonna be wearing my own merchandise. That could be excessive. But you have to get in this mindset of, hey, I am a business owner. I'm a walking talking billboard and my personal brand is a promoter that's working for me 24/7, even if I'm sleeping. And to the average person who's not in that mindset of creation, but consumerism would view everything that I just mentioned as that is excessive. That's over the top. It's kind of like the things online of like going and doing a cold plunge. Do you really need to do a cold crunch? And we shouldn't make fun of that because those are things that work. - I love that. I love how we are the walking billboards for a business. We may not be able to shell out $10,000 to have a billboard advertising sense during the middle of Times Square, but wearing a hoodie that says your brand on it with a QR code or something that someone can snap a picture of and find out more about you. That's gonna hit a thousand more people than that billboard in New York in Times Square. I wanna talk about the future. Where do you see yourself in 10 years? 'Cause you've already had a crazy route already, root already. Where do you see yourself going in 10 years? We snap our fingers 10 years in the future. What is the consultant group? Are you onto your next venture? Are you now head of Pepsi? What are you doing? - Everything that I'm doing for clients is we help emerging and establish public figures, optimize and scale their personal brand. Optimize is things we can approve, cracks we can fill, things that you might not have thought about, improving your distribution, improving your strategy. I'm falling underneath the second category of who I'm serving, scaling. And so the next 10 years will be 100% about scaling. That means speaking on larger stages, speaking on more stages, accelerating my personal brand in front of millions of people across social media, millions of streams on podcasts, as well as implementing or really showcasing and building myself as that credible public figure. I've had glimpses of this over the past year of I've had these aha moments like, man, I'm getting emails every single day to invest in companies or to work with people. And these are individuals that are taking time matter their days, finding my information and sending me an email, I cannot overlook that. And so it's really going to be scaling and you ask in terms of, am I still building MCG or am I the head of Pepsi? Mashman Consulting Group will have 500 consultants by 2035. They will be people that will be personally trained by me and my team. They will be working for the firm and going out and helping other business owners, such as yourself or anybody listening on varying levels, not going to necessarily have to only work at high level executives, but making it accessible, whether it's 500 or $750 to start and just helping people get their personal brands out there. So building MCG into this empire, nine figures, highly successful. I can take that capital, invest in commercial real estate, my own real estate, do some venture capital, angel capital, all that good stuff, right? So having that vehicle towards other investments and then scaling my own personal brand of my own life and having the family and having the house on a hundred acres of property. That's really the next 10 years and striving. My purpose in life is to live up to my potential and that will be what that next decade encapsulates. So by the time I'm 35, things will be really where I wanna be. I don't think that there's any reason why I won't be able to get there. - I love that. And speaking of reaching your potential, that takes a lot of investing in your self. What are some of the things that you do to invest in yourself, to bring yourself to being able to reach those goals that you have, those very high goals that you have for your personal brand in that? - Reverse engineer the successes and this is huge. So for example, if you wanna get in his shape, you reverse engineer the things that you're doing that will not be conducive to losing weight or getting into better shape. So one of the big things is not just doing a workout but actually pushing myself in that workout. So I don't just wanna go on a hike. I wanna wear weighted vest, right? And these are things also from a mindset point of view that helped me feel even better by the time I get home, I'm like, man, I compare when I just go for a hike in the local park or whatever, two and a half miles, and I come home, I'm like, all right, that was cool. Versus I come home after wearing the 40 pound of weighted vest for that two and a half mile hike with elevation, I'm like, man, I am exhausted. I take my vest off and I'm like, ooh, I feel light. This is good, I feel good. Those different things that can make it a little bit more challenging. Or when it comes to consuming information, this is something I love doing is listening to podcasts on 1.3 or 1.5 X speed while I'm working out. So I'm able to do multiple things at once. Earlier, I'm putting together in my office, I have the end my let show going on my Amazon and I'm able to consume information while I'm doing a task that's productive. And so doing more with less effort. Again, delegation, in a sense, I'm delegating tasks in my life in order to fulfill those certain areas because I recognize I'll never be able to live up to my potential. That's a fool's game to think that you will ever live up to it. And there are multiple levels of it. I believe that there are about six main areas, fiscal finances, interpersonal, interpersonal, emotional, spiritual, and physical potentials. And every task you do is going to contribute to one of those categories. And similarly, thinking from reputation, management, standpoint, every task that you're doing online, every relationship, every conversation, everything you're doing is either positively contributing to your reputation, your personal brand, or harming it. And so it's the same thing with the things that you're consuming on a daily basis. - I'm like that. What book are you reading right now regarding business that you think would be a great addition to the libraries of entrepreneurs or pre-entrepreneurs right now? - There is a book called The Empire of Business by Andrew Carnegie, and it's actually not a book in the traditional sense. I had the luxury of finding and getting into a bidding war in eBay for this set that I got. But it's a collection of his essays that were compiled into a book that were published a couple years prior to his death. And it's fascinating because he breaks down how the world was back in the 1900s when he was building his empire, right? But a lot of the things that he discusses also apply today. So he talks about how we always put our eggs on multiple baskets and Andrew Carnegie said you should put all your eggs in one basket and watch that damn basket. It's crazy. It's against almost everything people talk about now. People are like, "Oh, diversify your income streams." And he's like, "Focus all on one." And then he talks about how the market back then was it was cheaper to buy American products and more expensive to buy imported products. And we flipped over the past hundred years. And he talks about how to align your business employees with the corporations such as doing stock shares. He's talking about this a hundred plus years ago. It's such a wonderful book. And the other book is, and this would get me some flack depending on who's listening, is "The Prince" by Nicola Machiavelli. This is a really interesting book. And not many people are willing to admit, yeah, I'm openly reading Machiavelli's work. But if you take a step back and you don't think from the standpoint of some sociopath narcissist, a lot of what he talks about also applies in business in a positive light. So for example, we talked about hiring earlier, he talks about how the prince who brings advisors in, he says that you never want people to just openly give you advice. Think about when somebody tells you, "Hey, you need to do this." And you're like, "I didn't ask you for your opinion." What, dude, like screw off. Versus the, "Hey, I really appreciate your opinion. "Can you give me your advice?" You respect that better. But he says that when hiring, I say hiring in the sense, but when you're finding advisors for your kingdom, find people that are ambitious enough to have their own desires and their own dreams, but are closely aligning their outcomes and their successes with your own. And he says that, so when I was bringing on consultants, and when I first found Eric, I knew that Eric had the same vision to build out his own success and to retire his family and to travel and live a good life. And he's a great kid with morals and ethics. But I also knew that he was aligning his own success and his future with my success. That means that he was going to be able to build with me. And I wouldn't have to worry about him backstabbing me and going down the path of I'm so ambitious and I have my own journey, my own path that I'm pursuing that I'm not aligned with him. So I suppose I'm talking about from a place of abuse versus a place of let's build and locking arms in partnership. And so "The Prince" by Machiavelli, if you analyze all the chapters and really study it, there are different things that you can apply in your own business and your own life that are really, really solid. - I have to agree with the book of "The Prince" 'cause I've read it and I know it's been abused into being this narcissistic sociopathic type thing, but it really was more of a letter of caution to future empires to learn how to properly protect yourself from the failings that most empires face. And it's a wonderful book. - Yeah, it's really fascinating and I actually had the pleasure of getting a special illustrated edition from Goodwill for $1.50. I was like, "Wow, good find, man. You're not sleep on Goodwill. If you're starting out in business, there is no shame. I'm never going to be the entrepreneur that's like, there's shame in buying from a through." Absolutely not, absolutely not. Go on Sunday, get the dollar days, you get some good finds, right? But one of the things that he says in there too, it's kind of the same thing as a supposed religion, right? You take one verse out of context and you can make one religion seem like it's a complete war-mongering religion when you miss the context before the historical context that is involved. And in the Prince, he openly says that I'd discourage being just blanketly evil. And he shares stories of, for example, somebody had his general go and basically kill all of the offenders and then he put all of the blame on the general and had the people kill the general and the Prince was completely absolved of blame because there was a scapegoat. And he says, I'm sharing the story, but that doesn't mean I agree with it. Context matters. Yeah, oh my God. We are coming to the end, which I hate, 'cause it has, it's been, I'm really thoroughly looking forward to rereading the transcript of this and just picking out all the golden nuggets that I missed throughout this whole episode. But I have your 10-year-old self here. Now I ask this question because I have a nephew who's six and I wanna become the cool uncle and hand in this book of knowledge from amazing entrepreneurs like yourself. I have your 10-year-old self here. What's one piece of advice you would love to hand back to your 10-year-old self? I love and hate questions like these and I purposely told you not to share these questions with me because I love being put on the spot like this. And I would tell him to do exactly what he ended up doing. And I know that it might be the easy way out here, but there are a lot of things that I could have done better when I was a kid and single-parent household, my mom remarried. I hate my stepdad. That's never changed. I don't think that'll ever change, frankly. And I would push him purposely when I was younger and I just couldn't stand him and I could have saved a lot of stress growing up if I didn't and if I just listened and I rolled over. And I would tell him to do exactly what his gut is telling him to do. And that intuition that I developed over time for understanding people, for understanding myself, I would tell him to keep doing that. Keep going, trust your intuition, trust your gut because it'll help you get there, even if it puts you at odds with people. I think that's a great piece of advice. Yeah, intuition is so big to develop and most people overlook that. It's like if your gut is telling you something, it's probably telling you for a reason. It's intuition is an instinctual. And so much as it is being able to understand you in psyche and understand situations as they come, I mean, think about it from a sales standpoint, your intuition tells you when you can make the close or when you shouldn't, right? It's like, oh, my intuition is telling me that this person is primed and ready to work with me versus let me provide more context, more information and then that increases my chances of getting that close and offering them something they really need. - Isaac, I'm gonna jump off the stage here. I want you to talk to my audience. Tell them where they can connect with you, how they can possibly become a client of your consultant firm or your empire in the making as it is. So the forester is yours. - Well, Bill, thank you. I just wanted to take a second to say thank you to Phil better for inviting me on, investing in yourself, the digital entrepreneur podcast. Huge shout out to everybody listening as well. The number of things that I would leave you with would be you do not have to be some guru or ultra successful person to build out your personal brands. And one of the big things and reasons why people do not start is they don't know where to start and they don't know why they should start. And so the first step would be creating content online super easy. You could talk about your career, talk about your story, talk about your progress. The second thing that I would tell you is that your personal brand is a way for you to make money, drive attention towards a cause or because you very simply wanna build out your personal brand. That's why you wanna do it. If you already have one, you might as well consciously leverage it. Now, you can find me everywhere online. Just go to Google type in Isaac Mashman. You could go to Instagram or Facebook and connect with me or go to my website, Isaac Mashman.com. And to work with me personally, you could go to MashmanCG.com and I have this really cool AI chat bot that we've been building called KPI and it'll lead you into the next steps. - Excellent, Isaac, thank you again for an incredible episode. And I'm glad we were able to get this recorded before the next year so that I have a step up from my future self. Again, thank you so much for listening. Thank you so much for being here. It was a pleasure chatting with you. - Likewise, Phil. And I'm excited for the next conversation. - To my audience, make sure you check out the show notes down below. I'll make sure you have all the links to connect with Isaac there and try out his chat bot. I thank you so much for listening and so much for tuning in. And as always, remember to invest in yourself. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music)
