Why Personal Branding Is Keeping You BROKE

Controversial take, but I think building a personal brand right now is the worst thing you could possibly do. You see, every guru out there right now is telling you to build a personal brand, post content every single day, build this audience, and it will change your life. And while I do not dispute that fact, I think for the majority of people out there, it's actually a dangerous trap. And I'm going to explain why. You see, Having worked with so many business owners over the last 10 years, we understand there is a correct order to building a business profitably. And there absolutely is a place for branding and personal branding and posting content. I mean, heck, look at me right now posting this video on YouTube. But again, the order at which you get to it, I have seen have massive impact on businesses and their success. So in this video, I'm going to explain why for some of you, building a personal brand first is absolutely terrible idea. And I'm going to show you the 4-step framework, the method that you should use instead. So what's wrong with building a personal brand first? Well, several things. You see, a lot of people think posting organic content is free. And guess what? Organic content is absolutely the opposite of free. You pay for organic content. With your most valuable asset, time. Time to ideate, to script, to film, to edit, to post. And in order to have any significant traction with a personal brand, you have to do that at a ridiculous amount. Okay. For a very long period of time. Also, if you're worrying and stressing and putting all your time into building and creating all these pieces of content, what it can do for a lot of businesses is it actually delays the hard, meaningful work. When you don't have many customers and you're frantically creating content every single day to try and get some, posting on Instagram, writing LinkedIn posts, this can distract you from actually building the core conversion mechanism of your business, i.e., the way in which we turn attention into money effectively. And I've seen way too many people spend way too much time posting on the content and getting on that treadmill without actually building the core engine that's going to generate them money. Now, for most people, I believe that brand should be seen as an amplifier, okay? Now, yes, there are exceptions where people are so passionate and good at what they do and have the skill of articulating what they do and they enjoy the process of creating content that absolutely can use free organic content as the core driver of traffic within their business. However, for most people, that's just not true. They either don't quite have the skill set, they're not that capable of articulating themselves on camera, and frankly, they just don't fucking enjoy it. Because heck, for most people, getting in front of a camera and speaking is just really uncomfortable and not that fun. And so therefore, why would you want to build a business where that is the entire, like, thing that you have to spend so much time doing? And so I look at brand more of as an amplifier where once you have got a business that is up and running and have an engine where we can spend money on ads but convert it profitably into customers, we can then do some brand activity that is less strenuous and less demanding and we're less dependent on it. That will amplify because once you've got good marketing up and running and you start producing a lot of brand organic content, that is like pouring gasoline on a fire and it makes all of your paid ads, etc., work so much quicker and more effectively and more profitable. Because the deadly thing that can occur when you prioritize organic content too hard is it builds this crazy trap. Okay? When you have a personal brand, even at the highest level, if you look at Alex Hormozi, look at Gary Vee, these guys have reached the pinnacle of their brands. Where they have millions and millions of followers. What are they still doing? They are still posting 400 to 500 pieces of content every single week, and they carve out days of their time to focus on the content. I know Alex Hormozi, as an example, spends about 24 hours per week on his content. Okay, it's a huge chunk of his time. And that is because once you have built a personal brand and have an audience, Unfortunately, it's not like you can just set it and forget it. It requires constant maintenance and constant novelty in order to keep it fresh and keep it contributing revenue. Because us as humans, well, we adapt very quickly. And there's the whole concept of hedonic adaptation where once we see something new and interesting and exciting, boom, we get the dopamine and we like it and we consume, we consume, we consume. But then after we've consumed it, we adapt to that level very quickly. And so it takes constant generation of new novel stuff in order to keep the audience hungry and entertained. And there are many people who have built these brands and then they burn out because they're unable to sustain them. So unless you are prepared to build a business that thrives off your organic content, that is going to require consistent input from you every single week, then it's probably not the best idea. Instead, we want to build a business that can run, that can grow, that can scale without having a crippling dependency on you to get in front of the camera and fucking dance around every single week. So what is the alternative? Well, this is the model that I present and take my clients through. So At the base layer, we want to prove it. We want to prove that we have a great offer that people want. Then we go a layer up and we want to build it. Then we go a layer up. This sucker is going to pay us big time. We're going to make it pay. And then right at the tippy top, then we have amplification. And we are going to multiply it. And that is where the brand is going to come in. So I'm going to walk you through these 4 layers now. So layer number 1, what? Prove it. Prove it. This is relevant if you are starting a business or if you have a business already, because prove it means we need to have a validated offer. What is that? That means We have an offer that people have bought from us and not just one person, not just our mum or family friend, but actual customers. So we want to have, you know, multiple sales if you're in the high ticket space, but in the low ticket space you want to have many more because we need to be very confident that there is a market for our thing. And in order to do so, we need to make some sales. People must vote with their credit cards, not just with what they say. And the worst thing you could do is start a new business and go down the organic content route and spend a fucking year posting all this content online, only to turn out no one actually fucking wants your thing. Now, if you have a business already, this is the first step I take the clients through, because normally if they are not able to grow, scale their marketing, it's because they haven't actually validated the numbers in their business. And we take them through an exercise called the Magic Number Scorecard, which basically lets us look at the economics of the business. Like, does this make sense? What is the average order value or the price of the thing that we're selling? Are they going to be one-off customers or are they going to buy multiple times? What's our lifetime value therefore going to be? And of course, what's our gross profit margins? How much do we have to spend to fulfill on this thing? And then based on that, we can work out our lifetime gross profit and indeed our customer acquisition cost that we would be willing to spend on ads in order to acquire one of these customers. And you have to do this because it gives you the first layer of sense check as to like, is this a viable business? Because back in my agency days, we would have to do this because if you're running paid ads, you need to have good economics, otherwise you're screwed from the outset. And way too many businesses never do this and they have the worst economics in the world. I remember chatting to a customer once and they had a pet product and it was a one-off purchase pet product because once you bought it, it would basically last you for the rest of your life. And they sold it for £12 and it cost them like £9 to make the thing. Like with those economics, you are just completely screwed. Like the sheer volume that you would have to sell It's just, oh my God, terrible business. And again, it's because they had a passion for this thing and they created it. And that is very sweet. But without economics behind it, you just are setting yourself up for failure. So you want to have a business that effectively has got a nice chunky bit of lifetime gross profit because then we sacrifice a little bit of that lifetime gross profit as our customer acquisition cost, what we can afford to spend. And remember, we want to have the biggest customer acquisition cost possible because that means it's easier for us to acquire customers through marketing. Now, obviously, when we're doing our marketing, we're trying to optimise it to get the lowest customer acquisition cost. But you don't want to do what a lot of people do and give themselves like such a teeny tiny customer acquisition cost that it's impossible to run anything. You know, a lot of businesses say ads just don't work for our business. And no, that's not true. The reason they say that most of the time is because they have calculated that they're only willing to spend, you know, fucking £5. To acquire a customer that might be worth £1,000 to them. And so again, economics, the numbers, these give you visibility and clarity on what's going on and prove that you have a model that is worth investing time, effort, energy, and money in scaling. After we proved it, we move to layer number 2, which is build it. So this is where, again, if you're prancing around making content, it's distracting you from building the core conversion mechanism, the mechanism that converts eyeballs into money, because again, we want to have some— somebody see our stuff and them to effectively give us some dosh. A series of things will need to happen in order for that to occur. And so the first thing we look at here is, well, what is that conversion mechanism going to be? Because depending on your business, if you're selling, you know, a £50 thing versus a, you know, £5,000 thing, there's going to be a different mechanism, a different journey that person goes on. You know, if I'm selling something that's really straightforward and simple, then I can probably just run an ad to a landing page that explains what it is and gives them the option to buy. If I'm selling something that's a bit more amorphous, like a high-ticket coaching program that is slightly more complex sale, that is also more expensive, well, chances are people are going to need to consume and learn a lot more about that thing before they are ready to buy. So therefore, my approach with those guys would be very different. We would do a kind of live webinar or get them on a call first so we can chat to them and understand their situation. Either way, we're trying to find the right funnel for the right offer. And this is sadly where a lot of people go wrong as well, because they just do the wrong thing. But once we've got that, we build it and we start to make it good. That brings us to the next layer, making it pay. When you build a marketing funnel for the first time, The results in the early stages should be the worst they will ever be. But it's very, very rare that you build it and it is just boom, amazing, crazy profitable straight out the gate. So once we've got it running and it's spitting out some customers, we want to make it pay us because just getting sales does not mean, you know, scalable profit, which is the end game here. And so Once we're making it pay, we then want to look at how this funnel is performing. And so every funnel is just a sequence of steps. All we do here is we look at what those sequence of steps are. So in a classic, let's do a live webinar funnel, we are going to run some ads to an opt-in, to then the live webinar, which will then have some kind of offer. Okay, now in our case, the offer would be a book a call, and then they'd have the call, and then we would actually, you know, sell them the thing. So with every funnel, it's very unlikely that when we first build it, it's going to be working at its absolute best. And so our job, once it is getting some traction, is to have a look at it, because unfortunately, such is the nature of life, um, our funnel represented by this bucket here, it's just going to have a bunch of leaks, going to have a bunch of holes, okay? Areas where we are losing a bunch of people. And so our job is to look at our funnel and say, okay, where are these holes? Is it our, you know, ad click-through rate? Is our cost per lead too high? Is it our landing page conversion rate? Is it our show-up rate to the calls? Where are the problems and how can we fix them? Because in every funnel there will be one hole that is bigger than them all., and that is the hole we need to patch first. And so we need to hone in on that, make the improvement, and then we are going to get paid more and more and more. And we start to build some lovely momentum. This then brings us to the final stage: multiply it. At this point, we have got a funnel that is now spitting out cash and we're in a nice rhythm of systematically just improving it week by week based on the constraints that are appearing. And so now we can multiply it. Now we can pour gasoline on the fire. Now we can invest in brand. This is the stage for me where you now have consistent revenue coming in, which gives you incredible peace of mind as the business owner. But now you can invest in producing content, allocate a bit of time to it, start to explore which channels you enjoy creating. Are you more of a writer or do you really enjoy the video stuff or neither? Do you want to actually just employ someone or hire someone to do this for you. But now you can start to build those brand asset blocks and get them going, knowing that the engine you've already built is going to start to increase in profitability. Because now if people consume your content online, they're more familiar with you and then they get hit with ads for your core thing. Guess what? Their probability of converting goes through the flipping roof. But you are now able to do this on your terms. You're not caught in a vicious trap and you already have a beautiful mechanism built that is driving revenue into the business that you can really build upon. And so that is why we leave the multiplication to the end, because again, I'm not anti-brand. I love brand. I see incredible power in it. And for some people, yes, if you fucking love content, extremely charismatic and confident in front of camera, then do the brand route that makes sense for you. But for the vast majority of people, That is just not the case. And so don't feel bad when you hear all these gurus talking about brand and why it's so critically important and instead focus on building the right foundations before then looking at deploying a bit of brand to amplify the whole thing a bit later on. So I hope that was useful to you. Remember, prove it, build it, make it pay, and then multiply it. Boom! I'll see you next week. Goodbye.