How to Grow Your Brand In 2026 | Ep 958

In the last 12 months, my social media had a grand total of 3 billion impressions and brought in 4.5 million new subscribers. And with that, I managed to break the world record for the fastest selling nonfiction book of all time, generating just over $105 million in sales in a weekend. And here are my top lessons that I've learned when it comes to building a personal brand. Enjoy. You guys want to hear something absolutely insane? I was able to take home more in a year than the CEOs of McDonald's, IKEA, Ford, Motorola and Yahoo combined as a kid in his 20s. And I have continued to for over half a decade, which resulted in a $200 million per year portfolio and $100 billion net worth by age 32. And no one is more surprised than me. Me expressing that fact will create envy in some, anger in others, skepticism in most, confusion in old people, and inspire a select few. You are who I made this presentation for. But before I dive in, raise your hand if you'd like any of the following things to happen. To be able to charge 2 times, 5 times, 10 times more than your competition for the exact same thing. Like Yeti. We have basically identical cups and somehow they're able to charge $40 versus $10 simply because of what's on the cup. If you'd like to be able to have customers buy from you over and over and over again without considering competition, like Harley, once you're a Harley guy, you stay a Harley guy for life. And if you'd like to virtually guarantee sales in any new business or product that you launch, like Apple, a lot of people just wait in line. They say, just leave my credit card, just bill me and send whatever you're going to come out with. And that's more or less how a lot of Apple buyers are. Once they become an Apple person, they become an Apple person for life. So if you like that stuff, great, because that's what this talk is about. And so I couldn't figure out how these brands, these companies were able to do this, demand these prices, get people to stay loyal for a really long time. And I felt like for me, I always had to like beg, borrow and steal and I had to squeeze and push so hard just to get people to buy. Whereas these companies made it look effortless. And it's because I didn't understand this one thing. And that's the subject of the talk today— brand. And the thing is, even people who claim to understand it often don't. And the few who do understand it do a terrible job teaching it. So this definitely isn't going to be Marketing 101 class on branding, presentation, colors, and logos. And this definitely isn't going to be about feelings, presence, intuition, or whatever. This is about making money. And this concept I'm going to explain to you is how I built a 7.8 million person audience across all these platforms in the past 40 months or so. I sold over a million copies of my last two books and do deals worth hundreds of million dollars in our holding company, Acquisition.com. That is why you build a brand, or at least that's why I built mine. And so today I'm going to cover three things. Number one, What branding is. If you don't know what it is, you certainly can't build one. Number 2, why it makes money. Because once you have it built, you're like, okay, well, how do I trade this thing for doll hairs, which is what we want? And then third, how to start and grow yours. So let's start with the first one. What branding is. So when I decided to build a brand, I looked at what many popular marketers said about it. Here are some popular definitions that I have removed the marketers from them. This is not throwing shade, so I'm just saying, though. A brand is a person's gut feeling about a product, service, or organization. A brand is not what you say it is, it's what they say it is. A brand is a set of expectations, memories, stories, and relations to that, taken together, account for a customer's decision to choose one product or service over another. A brand is emotional shorthand for accumulated and assumed information. A brand is present when the value of what the product, service, or personality means to its audience is greater than what it does for the audience. A brand is a product, service, or concept that is publicly distinguished from other products, services, or concepts so that it can be easily communicated and usually marketed. Branding is the process of creating and disseminating the brand name, its qualities and personality. The promotion of a particular product or company by means of advertising and distinctive design. If these sound vague and confusing, it's because they are. And I was just as confused as you when I was trying to figure this out. Because none of them told me what to do. And so after looking at all these marketers' words, I think I pieced it together, at least enough that once I started thinking about it this way, in a different way, I'm about to share with you, my brand grew and it grew fast. And the reason this is so important is that if you don't know what to do, nothing's going to change. Fundamentally, if you don't change your behavior, obviously nothing's going to change as a result. And so I wanted to define this one term before we get going. Learning. Who here came to learn? Raise your hands. Fantastic. Or otherwise just be talking to the wall. So learning means same condition, new behavior. And so if I wanted to teach someone a phone script, then after teaching you, the phone rings again and you say the new script, you learned. Learning occurred. On the other hand, if I tried to teach you the script and then the phone rings again and then you change nothing. No learning occurred. You learned nothing. And that's why none of this stuff that these guys said helped me, because I didn't know what I could do. I didn't know what behavior I had to change as a result of this. So I didn't know how to do it. And so here's how branding happens. Branding is a deliberate pairing of things through an outcome. So I'll say that again. Branding is a deliberate pairing of things through an outcome. So let's use Coca-Cola, drinking it and liking it as our example. The yum, a.k.a. the outcome. That's what people get. They pair that with drinking, the action. So they do to get it with Coca-Cola, the product. So the next time you want some yum, you you're probably gonna reach for a Coca-Cola if that was paired for you successfully. And so branding is a deliberate pairing of things through an outcome. That's it. But sometimes businesses pair stuff, pair their stuff with things that people don't like. That's bad branding. This leads to losses for the business. Now, some of you guys may have seen this. This is Dylan Mulvaney. Doing a collaboration with Bud Light. There was a lot of press around this advertisement. This advertisement was actually a great advertisement, and you might think I'm crazy, but it was. Let me explain. It's just not the way you might think it was. This is a great advertisement because it let a lot of people know about their stuff. It let a lot of people know about the product, about Bud Light. By the way, if you're curious, that is the definition of advertising. Not branding. Advertising is letting people know about your stuff. Branding is the pairing that occurs as a result. So it was good advertising, but bad branding. Many customers hated this pairing. Lots of people found out, but a lot of people hated it. Good advertising, bad branding. And so as a result of this bad branding, people not liking the pairing, fewer people bought the product, which netted a loss for the business. And so to fix this, Bud Light paired their product with stuff the audience liked, like Shane Gillis, who is a man's man comedian, and the UFC, a man's man of sports, if you will. And sales began to recover. So that's the 101 explanation of branding. Let's go into 201. So to get a little deeper, because the better you get at this, the more money you will make. Like, the more nuance you can understand how to brand and build a brand for yourself, the more money you will make. I promise you that. And so to some people, the Dylan Mulvaney pairing was actually good in general, both good advertising and good branding. Hear me out. For others, it was bad. Obviously, all pairings have positive and negative results, and that's because everyone's different. Everyone has different preferences. But for a business, you can objectively see if a pairing was good or bad, whether it netted you more money. So more people dislike the Dylan Mulvaney pairing. So sales suffered, making it a bad pairing. So this isn't opinion. They objectively made less money. And so this pairing was a bad one for their ideal audience. Now, the 301 version of this is, is there a company or a product where the Dylan Mulvaney pairing could have been both good advertising and good branding so that the majority of people would have bought? I think the answer is yes. It just doesn't necessarily mean it's Bud Light for conservative males as the primary audience. And on the other hand, some people love the new Gillies and UFC pairings and some hated it, but more of the audience that is their ideal customer liked it, saw it as good. And so the business netted sales as a result and they made more money. Good branding. And so for Budweiser, and I just want to call this out, this is specifically for Budweiser and their customer base. It's not that Shane Gillis or the UFC is magic in some way, or Dylan Mulvaney is un-magic in some way. But for that specific audience, yes, the pairing mattered and how much of the base liked it or disliked it. So if you're anything like me, making money is the point. So let's drive this home. If you made a pairing of your thing and your customer and you got to choose which outcome you had happen. So you have your product and they drink it. There's an outcome that happens afterwards, right? That pairs with it. On one hand, 75% like it and 25% hate it. Or on the other hand, 25% like it and 75% hate it, which would be the bottom example. Which would you choose? More money good. The big, the big green one. Yes, of course. The top one, because it would make you the most money. And so to be clear, for the 201 level of understanding, branding always happens. Branding always occurs. But our goal is good branding. And good branding is a deliberate pairing of our business with good outcomes for our ideal customers. And so what you pair your business with determines two key things. One, who pays attention to your business, and two, whether they go towards your business, like the UFC example, or away from your business, like the Della Mulvany example. And so at the beginning of this, I said I was gonna cover three things. The first thing I said is what is branding? But now that we have gone through that, I wanna re-say what I walked us through, which is what good branding is, ideally. What we're shooting for. So now that we've covered that, let's talk about why it makes you money. Why good branding makes you money. Branding, as I define it, happens everywhere all the time, but businesses use it for profit. So let's look at some of the earliest uses of branding to figure out how we can use it. So these are the first entrepreneurs who use branding to make money. Real quick, I'm gonna show you the exact 10-stage roadmap from zero to $100 million plus that less than 1% of companies finish. I've now done multiple times. And so I can say with a lot of confidence that these are the stages as headcount increases that you need to get through. And I broke each of these down by 8 different functions of the business, what the constraint feels like, like what are the symptoms of it when you're going through it, and then what steps we actually took to graduate. And we've done this across software, physical products, service businesses, brick and mortar, all of this, and it works. And it's my gift to you, it's absolutely free. And so the link's in the description, but you just go acquisition.com/roadmap, just enter your info and it'll spit it right back to you all free. The earliest version of branding that we can think of, or at least that I can think of, happened on livestock. It was literally a brand. They would heat up metal, they'd sear it into the side of a cattle, and they would get a lovely little logo. Maybe we'll have a Nike swoosh cow someday. And so they literally burn these symbols into animals, and those symbols had a magical effect. So let's say you're walking around and you see a cow with no brand. You say, hello, cow. The cow says, move back. And it has nothing on it. This is just a cow. You might leave it alone and that might be it. On the other hand, let's say the cow has a brand you recognize. Say it's your neighbor's. You might be like, hey, that's Bill's cow. Now, if you like Bill, you might grab the cow and pull him by the— whatever you pull cows by— and probably return it to Bill. If you hate Bill, then the cow may stay lost in the wilderness forever. And become lunch for your family for the next month or two in the form of delicious burgers. Moo. But either way, for better or for worse, the brand affected what you did. It affected your behavior. And so to take this to the 201 level, what if you see a branded cow but you don't recognize the brand? You might be like, who dis? I see a logo. But I don't know anything about it. Well, then you would treat it how you treat branded animals in general, in that you just know that it belongs to someone. And so you would treat it the way that you treat it as though it belonged to anybody else. And even if only a tiny bit, you would treat a wild cow different from a branded cow in general. So if you had one that was wild and you had one that you didn't recognize but was branded, you would still probably treat them differently. So that just shows you the power of brand as a concept, because it dictates a tie between that cow and a human being or some complex animal that can brand cows. And so these are all effects of brand in general. So that's how it affects what people do. And so now I wanna get tactical on how we translate that concept into getting them to buy. So let's say we pair our brand. So this is where we get really tactical and this is like, okay, if you don't have a brand, this is the step-by-step right now. So you have a weak brand and we say it's a weak brand 'cause it's starting out. You don't have really a lot of associations. Fantastic. So now you want to pair it with people, experiences, other stuff that your ideal customer likes. So in this instance, I'm using little Nike pairing with LeBron and Tiger, who are champions, world-class, GOATs, etc. And so people who like sports and competition would see that probably as a positive pairing, a.k.a. good stuff. And so if we do that pairing or we make that pairing, for the majority of people, branding will occur. And so the brand grows. And so the question then follows: what's the benefit of a strong brand versus a weak brand? And so the, the weak brand is before the pairing, the stronger brand is after the pairing. So a strong brand turns commoditized products like a $5 white t-shirt plus the strong brand into a premium product, a higher value brand name product. And premium products with a strong brand then get customers to want to pair themselves with the product so that they can associate the outcome themselves with the outcome the brand delivers, which they do with their money. So how do they make that association? They give money, they get the shirt. The association happens based on what they've seen, where that logo has been elsewhere. And so then they go from I want to be a winner to exchanging money and saying, now I am a winner, or I feel like a winner. That's how this works. And so this means that if the ideal customer likes sports, winning, and competition, et cetera, then they're more likely to buy stuff from a brand paired with those things. So let's lay it all out. Weak brand paired with stuff customers like creates a strong brand. Strong brand gets put onto a winning product, transforms a generic to winning product. Then the customers want to associate with that winning product. So they buy the product and they put money into your bank account in order to do it. And so as long as you net a positive between what it costs you to associate with Tiger and LeBron and how many t-shirts you can sell as a result, you make money. And so here are some steps in words for those of you who are more word people. You start with a brand that means nothing. You have a logo just like the cow that the other person didn't recognize. People know that it is a brand. They just don't know what that brand means yet. So it means nothing right now. Then you pair that brand with something or someone that your customers ideally like. Third, your brand starts to mean the thing customer likes to them. Then they want to associate themselves with that thing they like or get more of it. But they can't buy that thing. But they can buy a tiny sliver of that association. So they buy the shirt with the logo that means that thing to them. And so they get the shirt, you get the money, and it all happened because you deliberately paired it with something they like. And this happens everywhere. So Dolce Gabbana, classic example. They paired with Kim Kardashian. They made a line specifically for her. And so for a lady who wants to associate with fame, beauty, wealth, that would be a pairing that makes sense. And so that lady who wants other people to associate her with fame, high class, money, luxury, wealth will then buy Dolce Gabbana and be like, I'm just like him. Now, she might not say that directly because she might just associate with the values, but the transference still happens. And so when someone looks at two products that on the surface are generically the same, you've got two t-shirts, one that has a weak brand or no brand and the other that has the strong brand, the person that has the strong brand, they're going to be more likely to buy and pay more for. And this happens because they actually buy the elements that we've deliberately paired with the brand which they identify with. And at this point of building a brand, you do this to change customer behavior, And that— excuse me— that is the point of building a brand, to change customer behavior in your favor when they see it with a product. And so this is a quote from Warren Buffett that I like a lot, kind of signifying some of the elements of the benefits of brand. He said, the single most important decision in evaluating business is pricing power. If you've got the power to raise prices without losing business to a competitor, you've got a very good business. And if you have to have a prayer session before raising the price by 10%, then you've got a terrible business. And so if we have an unbranded t-shirt for $5 and we say, you know what, we think we have a strong enough brand that we can raise the price and then boom, we can raise the price and still not lose that many sales. But we, in this case, 12x the price. Good branding drives that premium pricing. Good branding also improves advertising. So with the generic brand, if you're marketing this white t-shirt, you might get half a percent of people. There are many white t-shirts, there are many like it. This one is mine. Just kidding. So the point, for those of you got the reference, so if you have 0.5% click-through rate on something that's generic, there's nothing special about it. On the flip side, if you have a Nike brand t-shirt, same identical t-shirt, and it has the swoosh, now you might get 6 times as many people to click and buy at a higher price. See how these things stack together? That is why these brands exist for such a long period of time and make so much money. So they get cheaper customers, they get higher returns, and they have better response rates in advertising. And on top of that, as if that weren't enough, good branding also drives customer loyalty, a.k.a. they buy more stuff more times. And so like the Apple example I gave earlier, once you buy one Apple product, you tend to buy more and you tend to keep buying them. And so this also— a good brand also protects your business from competitors stealing that customer in the future. And so as I promised in the beginning, who's seeing how this, all this stuff allows you to one, be able to charge 10 times or more than your competition. Two, get higher returns on advertising so you can scale that much more, that much faster. And then three, get people to keep buying for life, compounding your money-making skills for good. Okay. Which is why building a brand will make you lots of money. It's also why brands outperform commodities in every single industry. And give a lasting competitive advantage that, to be fair, is theirs to lose. So here's another quote from Uncle Warren. It takes 20 years to build a reputation and 5 minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you'll do things differently. And so I said that I was going to cover 3 things. One, what branding is, which we renamed what good branding is. Second, why it makes you money. I think we got that. So now let's go to how to start or grow your own brand. So branding is the deliberate pairing of things, your thing plus what your ideal customer has, through an outcome. And good branding is the deliberate pairing of your thing with something good. To start a brand, we have to know what we want to pair it with to attract ideal customers. So here we've got Bud Light, UFC, good outcome for the majority of the audience. And we want to understand that just as much as we should also understand what to avoid pairing our brand with to lose customers, like the Della Mulvaney example. And so here's how I like to think about assembling the pairings for brand. So if you're at ground zero, you have, you have no brand. You've got these elements that haven't been put together yet. So I think about it like a table full of flowers. So if you want to put a bouquet together, you start by having lots of different flowers all over the place. On their own, those flowers are not a bouquet, just as products, values, experiences, people, etc. on their own are not a brand. The flowers are like the brand elements that we pair with stuff our audiences like. With enough pairing over and over and over again, they form a bouquet. Now replace the word bouquet with brand. And so that assembly is the connection, is the association between those things, because a brand fundamentally doesn't actually exist. If I take the flowers out of the vase and scatter them across, was there ever a brand to begin with? It's simply the association we make between those things that creates the one-of-one brand. And if we unravel it, the brand disappears. And so the deliberate pairing of those things makes the brand. And if we want to get narrower on our brand, so let's say I talk about tacos, lifting, and philosophy, if I want to narrow my brand, I'll just talk a bunch about tacos and then all of my flowers are just taco related. If I'm only talking about tacos, but I want to expand the stuff I'm talking about to my audience and maybe capture a wider audience, then I might talk about tacos, quesadillas, burritos, things that are tangential. And then if I wanted to expand even broader, I might just talk about food in general, and then I might tuck in Am I talking alcohol? Am I talking restaurants? And then things that go wider and wider from there. And so we get narrower as we niche down and we go double down on one type of topic and we go broader when we branch out. But distant and random pairings hurt a brand because they're so hard to make the associations with. And this is what most brands are and do. Most people's brands happen by accident. It's just whatever they appear next to, whatever the people associate their stuff with. Good branding happens on purpose because like, what are we looking at with a bike, a single flower, some socks, and a burger? Not a lot. Not a lot to hold together there. And so think about it like curating a garden. You want some flowers to grow and you want to pull out the weeds. You have to do both. You have to add the good and take away the bad in order to assemble the ideal brand for you. And in the beginning, our brand won't be strong, just like yours won't. If you're building it, then you might only have a couple flowers there. And it's because you haven't had that many instances to pair your brand for that customer. But the more good stuff we pair with our brand for the customer, the stronger it gets. You go from one flower to many red flowers or many red roses that become a bouquet of red roses. That's what you're about. And the more you're about it, the more the brand strengthens. Now, what if we make a branding mistake and pair with the wrong thing? Because it's going to happen. One bad pairing can absolutely hurt a brand. So if I now give my— this lovely red rose bouquet to my wife and I say, hey, don't you love this bouquet? And she sees this rotten flower sticking out the front. She might be like, "Ew, this bouquet sucks," or "This brand sucks," or "Hey, that guy got a DUI and I thought he was this paramount of good ethics." Well, that would hurt the brand. And so just like one ugly flower messes up the whole bouquet, it changes how everyone sees the brand. This bouquet sucks. Now, to recover from something like that, you just have to overwhelm customers with the stuff they like until eventually the bad pairing shrinks into irrelevance. So we don't try and eliminate the DUI. We don't try and eliminate the dead rose. It happened. There's nothing we can do about it. But what we try to do is just overwhelm it with way more of the stuff that the majority of our people actually like. And so Kanye, for example, has said some things that people don't like, but he also comes out with products that people love. He made a Super Bowl ad. He sold shoes. He just came out with an album that came out after having some cancel culture stuff around him and things he had said. And so over time, people forgot the bad stuff and associated the good stuff back with him and purchased. They still bought. And so you need to decide what values, people, experiences, etc., that you want to use to connect the audience to your product. And equally importantly, what things you want to avoid, remove, or ignore from the stuff they hate. And so it goes without saying that even if you say you're premium, but people think your thing sucks, that suck will stick. And so up to this point, everything I've talked about has been the things external to the product. They've been the people you associate the product with. Now, almost all of that occurs prior to purchase. So you can absolutely get someone to buy the thing. But how many experiences are people going to have with the thing once they've purchased it? Probably far more than they have with your advertisement. And so the advertisement can let people know about it. The branding makes a good association for the person. They make the purchase, and then afterwards the product does a lot of the branding after that. Because if I buy that amazing Nike t-shirt and there is a hole in the armpit when it comes in, I might say, this is the first time I ever bought a Nike product. This product sucks. Therefore, Nike sucks. And then I think the whole thing is a sham. And then I also start to hate LeBron for even recommending, right? Starts to transfer backwards. Now, on the flip side, Brand can influence how people see the product. So if the product is what I would call good enough, so it's— it doesn't have any holes in it. Now, is it the highest quality it possibly could be? Maybe not, but it's good enough that no one's going to find an immediate problem with the product. That's where brand can carry you the extra distance to still make it a positive experience for the person. And so brand in a very real way can affect how people perceive value through products. Now, me personally, this is a pro tip here. If I'm going to charge a premium price, I absolutely want to make sure that the product is dialed so that I only further reinforce how much they like my brand rather than let my brand carry me or at worst have it conflict with the impression that I gave them of the thing they were going to buy prior to them buying it. This is a quote from Warren Buffett: "Your premium brand had better be delivering something special or it's not going to get the business." And the only tweak I'd have on this is that it's not going to keep the business. You'll get the first purchase. You just won't get the ones after that. And so all the things you're like, okay, got it. So brand is pairing. I get how the pairing makes me money. I have these big margins. I got more CTRs, more people buy. And as long as my thing doesn't suck, you know, ideally that it's good, people keep buying. Awesome. But how do I measure that? So brand has 3 main metrics. One, which is influence, which is how likely it is to change someone's behavior. So if I show someone a brand and they react in any way, they recognize it and they do something about it, then we have influence. Second is direction. Are they changing the way we wanted or are they running away? And third, how many people it changes for. That's it. So if I show a room of 100 people and 100 people react versus 2 people react, the 100 person reacting, at least recognition. That is the reach, how many people it changes it for. So taking the hypothetical extreme, a small, weak, and neutral brand, very few people recognize, and the people that do don't care that much about it either way. And on the other polar extreme, you have a large, large, strong, positive brand. So that would be lots of people recognize the brand. It changes behavior when they see the brand and the behavior is generally towards. So they try to do in accordance with what that brand is asking someone to do. And I want to make this point. A lot of people have this misnomer that any strong brand is polar, that because lots of people love it, lots of people also have to hate it. Now, I say this by percentage, not necessarily by absolute. If you have— if the whole United States knows who you are, you're going to have a percentage of people that hate you just because there's crazy people. And that's not what we're talking about. I'm saying, is there a brand that can have that kind of status that isn't polar? So all you've a polar example first. So I have the silhouette of Donald Trump here, and he has a very strong brand. He has a big reach. Lots of people recognize him. Even just the silhouette alone, people recognize. He has strong influence, as in the percentage of people that when they see this have a reaction in either direction, positive or negative, but just that they react shows that he has strong influence. And the third is the direction. Now, for him, he is polar, meaning Many people move towards him very strongly and many people move away from him very strongly. And so many assume that all brands are that way. And that's just because there are many examples of that. But that doesn't mean it has to be that way. And so I'll give you a different example. So some brands manage to change many people's behavior towards them all at once. And so like Taylor Swift, sure, I'm sure she's got some crazies. Don't get me wrong. But the vast majority of people who see Taylor Swift recognize her. She changed their behavior and most of the time it's towards her. So she is a large, positive, strong brand. This is also personally why I think the idea of like seeking out controversy absolutely gets you recognized. But you don't have to make that trade. You can absolutely just build a strong, positive brand. Mother Teresa has a strong, positive brand. A lot of people know her, influenced a lot of behavior, did a lot of good stuff. Most people are like, I hate Mother Teresa. Some people do, but most people don't. And the same thing goes with Apple. A lot of people like their products. I'm sure there are some tech geeks that are like, Android's way better, right? Or like, PC's awesome. And that's great. That's good for them. But the vast majority of people who encounter the product like it, which is why they're one of the largest companies in the world. So all those examples that I gave to you up to this point have assumed a large audience. And I do that because this is a presentation and it makes more sense for me to work with you on stuff that you already know. But this concept carries independent of whether you have large reach, and this is why it applies to you. So if you had a small audience with high influence, what would you have? Got mom and dad. They are high influence, as in most people, when they see their parents, their behavior changes. They have low reach because for you, they're only your parents. They might be some other people's parents, but not very many people's parents. As you have low reach and your behavior will go towards for some and away for others, meaning some people hate their parents and don't want to do anything they say. And some people like their parents and do whatever they say. And there's a lot of people in between. And so that's how we measure if what we're doing to grow our brand is actually working. Are more people finding out about it? Are more people changing their behavior when they do it? And ideally, are they doing that towards the direction that we want them to go? So if I say, hey everybody, go click here, go download this thing, go attend this event, go buy this product, whatever it is. If a lot of people do that, then we know that the brand is growing. When we want to build our brand, we want to pair our stuff with the things the highest percentage of our ideal audience like. And so whenever we pair anything with a brand, because especially if you're starting out, everything is new. And so every new pairing has risk. And so you risk losing a certain percentage of your audience who has a bad experience with the thing you pair. There's always that risk. There's always going to be some people who don't like something you do. If anyone's seen a small town band go hit it big, some of the old-timers are like, oh, they sold out, they did whatever. But what they did was they gambled the short-term loss of that local audience, potentially, for a much broader, bigger audience. So they made a bet. They did lose people. They did gain people. They just gained more than they lost. And so to the same degree, when you make that bet as the local band, you risk gaining other people who have had a positive experience with this new thing. And ideally, we have more green than red. And so those news pairings, the new pairings you make with a brand always lose audience, right? He sold out. I like the old stuff better. This also happens with content, by the way. And so this person is the red bucket. Fantastic. And the new stuff might also cause people to say, no, this new stuff rocks. And that person is in the green bucket. And so whenever you try to grow and you make any new pairing, meaning you make new content, you make a new, genre, you make a new song, you make a new anything, you make a bet that more people from your ideal audience will like the pairing than people who don't. TL;DR, that you'll net an increase in reach, influence, and positive direction. And so my ask for over here is don't let the 5 mean comments stop you from gaining the 500 new people who like the new thing. So let me finish the real-life example to make this whole thing real for you. I want to associate myself with business value. So I associate myself with making people money and growing their businesses. So there's me, there's me making content, and then ideally money. And so the best way I can do this is make content for the small business owner to consume and books for them to read and use so that they then profit. The good thing. And then they associate that growth and profit with me. And so then they consume more of my stuff. They drink the next soda, they buy the next shirt. And so the next time they want it to happen again, they take the action or they have a higher likelihood of taking the desired action. And equally important, people who don't like business stuff won't like my stuff or they'll just prefer to watch other things. So you've got this married couple. They say, we hate people who talk about money. They're probably not going to like my stuff, and that's okay. But people who like business, have a business, or trying to start one might want more. And this grows the brand because people consume the stuff and they say, hey, you got to check out Hermosi's stuff. And then that person they tell it to says, right on, they check it out, they get that positive outcome, they make the pairing as well, and the brand grows. And ideally with my ideal audience. And so to see this in action. If you use this information from today to make money, good branding has occurred. And so I said I was going to cover 3 things: what branding is, ideally what good branding is, why it makes you money, and how to start and grow yours. So hopefully you feel like I fulfilled those 3 things. And so now we can test if the pairing, good branding, actually occurred. So if you were my ideal customer, so here's a business owner. Okay, awesome. A lot of you. Fantastic. We can see objectively if this provided value. Did we get a good positive outcome, a neutral outcome, or a negative one? You might be like, I hate this guy talking about money. Or, you know what, I think this could make me a ton of money. Well, we'll see. So I want to further associate myself with value and making you money and growing your business. So I'm going to give you guys two gifts for free. The first is for existing business owners who want to scale. So most of you guys should raise your hands. I have two books, $100 Million Offers, $100 Million Leads. People say they made them money. There's a lot of 5-star reviews on them. Fantastic. And I made video versions of these books that you can get absolutely free on my site at acquisition.com/training. This is me further associating. If you, if you like this, you're going to love that and they'll make you more money for free. That's what it looks like on the inside. These are legit courses. And you can get those video versions on my site, again, absolutely free, actofdecision.com/training. Now, if you're like, man, I don't like watching stuff, I like listening to stuff, I wanna provide value for a different type of ideal audience, which is still business owners, but business owners who listen rather than business owners who watch, which is also fine. And so if you are somebody who's not a reader or not a watcher, I've got the books on my podcast, absolutely free. It's called The Game. They start at episode, $570-something. And so that's what I have for business owners. Who here is earlier on and they're like, I want to start a brand? Okay, cool. So this is for you. So I just became a co-owner of school.com, really awesome platform, helps people get started in business. And so anybody here who watches this or listening to this and wants the tools, the training, and a community of other people starting brands with a little friendly competition and some prizes, we made a step-by-step process on school to help you get started. and you can start for free. So hopefully I succeeded in providing value and a good pairing occurred. Ideally, good branding happened. Otherwise, I'm sorry. Everybody else, I hope good branding occurred. And for those of you who either start the Skool Games for free or use my stuff to grow your business, I will see you guys soon. So go to skool.com/games, adwords.com/training, and I will see you guys all there. Thank you guys so much for your time.