Become a power persona and make your platinum path to success with these two parallel programs

Hello and welcome to this episode of The Unnoticed Entrepreneur with me, Jim James, and Rocky Buckley, who's joining me from Charlottesville in Virginia. Rocky, welcome to the show.

Ah, thanks for having me, Jim. Great to be here.

It's my pleasure. Now, you've helped businesses and entrepreneurs to redefine their brands, and you've helped generate over $100 million worth of business. And we're going to talk about 2 programs that you've got. One for the company and one for the entrepreneur. So let's talk about that together. Rocky Buckley, tell us, how do you help entrepreneurs to get noticed?

Yeah, well, to get noticed, the core approach that I have from that standpoint, you know, a lot of people approach it from purely a tactical standpoint, put out a lot of content and so on. I approach it a little bit differently and I step back quite a bit further and I think about it strategically first. So what I like to do is I like to work with the entrepreneur from the inside out. Start with their life vision, get really clear on what it is that they want in life, and use that crystal clear vision to then define what their objectives are in business, create a business vision. And then from there, inside of that, determine, okay, within that vision, who is it that I want to be? Who is it that I want to become in light of that vision? Who do I want to be in the next 2 years, 5 years, 10 years? And then begin to strategically craft And design a public persona that is congruent with that vision. And so I think that's kind of the core before you can do all of the tactical approaches, you know, going live on Facebook and putting out a lot of ads and things, content. I think there's really a core foundation that needs to be there that a lot of people miss. And that's where all of really the power is in being a public figure. What are those aspects of you that release your natural passion, your charisma, that make you resonate and attractive, magnetic to other people. And I really start there. I try to tap into that sense of purpose and passion that brings out your personality, that brings out those best sides of you that really make you magnetic. So, it's really an X factor for a lot of people, like which people are going to, in a crowded marketplace, stand out and resonate with other people. And I think that for some, it's very natural, like they just have a natural personality or natural charisma and immediately, They just pop and they stand out in a market. For most of us, that doesn't happen. And then it requires stepping back and kind of becoming strategic about, okay, who do I want to be for whom? How do I position myself as unique and different in the market? And again, that requires some thought and work internally. So that's how I kind of approach the whole idea of standing out and getting noticed is really from the inside out and from a strategic perspective.

That is such a wonderful way of describing it, really. And Rocky, you've also touched on a point that the journey for an entrepreneur isn't necessarily a consistent one as it may be with a career path. We start businesses, we take them to a certain level, and then we need to transition out of them as well, right? So can you tell us, how do you help the entrepreneur, if you like, because they're changing, aren't they, over time too with their passions? What guidance or tools do you have to help with that change?

Yeah, I think jumping off of what I talked about first, it all really starts with the question, you know, what do you want? What is it that you want? And I find that we talked prior to us going live about Michael Gerber's E-Myth. And a lot of us start businesses because we're good at something. We want to become our own boss and we see an opportunity to hang out a shingle and start a business and so on. And then if we're lucky enough and we're successful enough, We get busy right away and our business starts to take on a life of its own. And like what was the case with me, you know, about 10 years into your business, you find out that like, I'm not happy. Like I'm successful, I'm doing well, but I'm dreading getting up in the morning every day and doing this business. Right. And that, you know, we all find ourselves there and we find ourselves in a position where, okay, I've now built the basic, Like business skills to be successful. What's the next level for me? How do I package financial success with lifestyle success, with happiness, with feeling fulfilled, with feeling like I'm making an impact in the world? And for people who, you know, to whom impact is really important, I think that's where, like, that's the kind of person I think that resonates with me the most. And that's why the life vision part that I alluded to earlier. is so important. It's like, what is my purpose? What do I want? Who do I want to become? And then from there, like, that is the basis where we can have a business, not only that makes us happy, but also allows us to become the best version of ourselves. Because when we really love something and we're really passionate about it, that's where we're going to become great. It's hard to become great with something that you don't love.

Yeah.

And so I think that getting in touch with all of that is the basis of the strategy. Now, once you determine what it is that you want, who do I want to become? What do I want my business to look like? Then you start reverse engineering that and saying, okay, how do I get there? And that involves a lot of other stuff like looking at the market that I'm in.

Okay.

Who's currently out there? How do I position myself as different? What's going to bring out that unique quality in me that's going to be different than everybody else? That's where you become very strategic at a certain point. So it's figuring out kind of internally, what do I want and how do I get there? And then it's being very calculated and designing that kind of an outcome, you know, and then executing on that. It's all a system and a process to be able to engineer that.

Yeah, I was gonna say, so it's interesting. It sounds as though you come more from the sort of the systems and the process perspective than the creativity. Content creation process?

Well, both are critically important, but I think if you start at a systems level, that allows you to understand, okay, the process of me becoming the person that I want to become is a system for me. How do I get there? So it's figuring out yourself, getting really clear on yourself, your market, and then your message, right? And then from a business model perspective, you know, how do I actually wanna monetize this? Do I want to be a speaker? Do I want to create digital products? Do I want to run a community? Right? So, finding out what it is that you really love, what you're really good at, what's going to inspire you every day, that's going to inform the business model. And then you start to execute that. But I find that what most entrepreneurs do is they start with, here's how I can make money and let me start using tactics. I'll chase a lot of shiny objects. I'll try to figure out how to make this work externally. And they find that it doesn't work for them or they're not happy, right? And so, I find that going back and building it from the ground up, from what you want, and then taking it all the way to the execution level, that's a system that will ultimately get you everything you want. The finances, the lifestyle, the impact, and the fulfillment. So, if that's your goal, to have success on all of those levels, on a holistic level, you've really got to do this in a congruent and systematic way. Yeah.

Well, and you've mentioned that you've actually got 2 programs, right, Rocky? Because what you've kind of described is you have one relationship with your career as an entrepreneur and you have another relationship with the business, don't you? And you're actually building 2 brands side by side, aren't you, that are complementary but not conflicting with one another. Rocky, how do you guide the entrepreneur that's maybe in a business and maybe looking to transition out, but at the same time needs to build a brand and that brand may well have been an extension of that entrepreneur's personality. And that's a structural challenge, isn't it, for most entrepreneurs who often represent the business at such a level that customers and employees can't even imagine the two not being together?

Yeah. And I think it ultimately depends on what it is that you want out of your business because some people run their business, but they're not necessarily the face of their business, right? They became successful, but they built a successful business. But they're not really a public figure. No one knows who they are, but they want to become a public figure, right? So, they've learned a lot of things over the course of their business and they want to share that with the world eventually. They're legacy-minded. They want to leave an impact and so on. So, they're pivoting from that direction. There's the other direction is where you start out as a solo entrepreneur and you're the face of your brand and all of a sudden, you know, you're successful, but you find you can't sell your business. Because you're integral to the brand, right? So you could come at it from 2 different directions. I believe that both are complementary and we should be building our businesses to sell ultimately at the end of the day. You don't want to build a job for yourself that you're essential to, and when you stop working, the money stops, right? So ideally you want to be able to pair being a personal brand with businesses and properties that you can sell. To other people at the end of the day. So there's a strategic process to be able to do that. And the way that I look at it from the person who is a personal brand and wants to then transition to selling their business, there's a process that you're gonna go through over time by creating properties that have branded names outside of yourself. So that might— Let's talk about that. Membership community. It might be some kind of a form of courses or seminars or something, but It will not have your name on it. And over time, you're going to bring in other faculty members and other partners who will then start to diffuse the business away from you. And over time, you can abstract yourself out and sell your business. And a lot of entrepreneurs have done that successfully, right? So the other approach, if you're starting out and you want to become known, you know, that's a whole other factor is how do I now take my success in business? And how do I now for the first time maybe become a personal brand? How do I start positioning myself? Right? And that ultimately goes back to some of the stuff we talked about earlier strategically. What do I want? What do I want to become known for? Who do I want to serve ideally? What's going to make me the happiest? Where are the opportunities financially? So, there's a lot of those considerations, but it's a question of, okay, how do I do this? You know, then it becomes a process of execution.

So, Rocky, you've got 2 programs. You've got the Platinum Path. And the Power Persona Project. Can you share with the unnoticed entrepreneurs, including me, you know, and I'm just selling my PR firm in Singapore, for example. So I'm just going through this whole transition of the agency that's been me for 25 years now is going to move to the next generation of young people to run it. So I'm fascinated from a personal level as well. These 2 programs that you've developed, how do they run side by side? Are they sequential? Are they, are they run in parallel? Tell us how people can do that.

Yeah, they do run parallel to each other, and I think that they're complementary and congruent. Both of those programs or sets of intellectual property that I developed are really for the solopreneur. Prior to a few years ago, you know, I was primarily working with corporate clients and that business became successful, et cetera. But I went through the process of realizing I wasn't happy and how do I really work with people that I care about and I want to make a difference for, and so on. And so I shifted my business model to work with solopreneurs, experts, people who had high-value knowledge, passion, expertise. And how do I help those people to succeed in business and build a great life out of that? So the Platinum Path program is really about helping the solopreneur reinvent their business model, shift into a high-price model, and be able to then package and leverage their time So that they can build a much more successful business that's lifestyle-friendly and gives them a lot more impact and so on. So Platinum Path is really a protocol for, you know, X-ing your price point much higher, positioning yourself as a top expert in the field, able to command premium prices, and then package your expertise in high-priced programs, properties, et cetera.

Okay.

So, that's what Platinum Path is about. The Power Persona Project is really all about the public figure. It's how do I design my public persona to be the most magnetic, to be the most charismatic and resonant with the marketplace? So, ultimately, the two pair together in the sense that, okay, I want to be a high-priced premium personal brand. So, one is more about the personal brand and the other one is more about the actual business model structure. that supports that.

Well, presumably listening to you, Rocky, you could have the business where you're building yourself out as a brand towards the, maybe the twilight of your running of that company and investing in building the value into the company and helping the next generation of leaders come in and adopt some of those processes so that they can continue it. Would that be a kind of the way that you might, if you like, move yourself on, but also ensure that the next generation can take over the business and have value from it?

Yeah. One of the key aspects to being able to do that is, so if you are an expert or you have this expertise that you, maybe you provide a service or you work with clients, you know, one-on-one and so on, the key to being able to liberate yourself is to be able to extract the knowledge out of your head or out of the head of your company and actually create systemized processes that you can package and brand. So, if you are somebody that's serving, you know, clients one-on-one, well, have you ever documented your systems? Have you created intellectual property? Because it's the intellectual property of the systems, the training, et cetera, that takes your knowledge out of your head, out of being able to maybe deliver it in a one-on-one time-for-money format to an actual digital format that can expand greatly your leverage. So by putting your knowledge, for example, into a digital course, now you give everybody around the world potential access to your knowledge or putting your knowledge into a book, right? It's the way to basically get it out of your head and leverage yourself and multiply yourself infinite numbers of times throughout the world. So, I think the first step to being able to do that, whether you're a solopreneur or you're a company, is to be able to really extract your expertise, put it into a documentable format, that you can then share with other people digitally, right? And I think that's the liberator for a lot of people.

Well, it's the liberator, but isn't it also the stumbling block, Rocky, for most people, right? You mentioned charisma. Most people aren't necessarily feeling charismatic. Many people are inventors, not salespeople, for example, as an entrepreneur. Are there any, if you like, tools that you can recommend, platforms that people could use to lean on start the early stages of that process of documentation and codification?

Sure. One of the great resources that I love is a book by Sam Carpenter called Work the System. And certainly we mentioned, you and I talked about Michael Gerber's E-Myth beforehand, but it's books or properties like that that help you go through that process of stepping outside of your business and looking at every piece of your business as a system. So, you actually have to do the work of actually noticing what it is that you're doing that makes the difference. Because a lot of us, we have expertise, we're so good at what we do that we become unconscious about why we're good at it. We never step back and realize like, okay, these are the things that I do to actually make what I do effective. So, being able to step outside of yourself and document what exactly is it that I'm doing, step by step in a linear process and recording that and turning those into standard operating procedures. It's that kind of a process that you have to go through to be able to really understand, you know, what it is that you're doing, extract your expertise, and then be able to share it with other people. Because it's only when it becomes an SOP that somebody else can pick it up and work with it.

Right.

So if it's just locked in your head, it's not doing any good for anybody else to learn it. Et cetera. So you want to be able to transfer your knowledge essentially.

Well, and big companies of course have manuals and guidebooks, don't they? So they've already figured that out a long time ago to create scale. You have to have that. Now, Rocky, you've been on a journey yourself as an entrepreneur. How are you getting yourself noticed? Because you've got 2 products of your own now. How are you getting yourself noticed?

Yeah, I mean, and I've gone through this whole process myself for the first 20+ years. Being in business, I was not a public figure at all. I was behind the scenes. I had big clients and, you know, I worked with them from a consulting standpoint and I had not built any social media. I was not well known at all and so on. And I had to build this from the ground up. And I'm frankly still doing that. I'm still in the fairly early stages of becoming known. But a couple of the ways that I've done it is, you know, to gradually build my social media presence. So like on Facebook and LinkedIn and so on, I've been able to build, you know, thousands of contacts there. Things like what I'm doing with you today is appearing as a guest on different podcasts, partnering with some big entrepreneurs. I just went a campaign with Tony Robbins and Dean Graziosi.

Oh, right.

On their Time to Thrive Challenge. So I've built relationships and partnerships with people who are big names. And I think who down the line hopefully can promote me. So there's been a lot of, but it's been, you know, It's all mechanical at that point. The hard part for me was really figuring out who do I want to be? Once you figure that out and you get your messaging clear and you get your branding clear, from that point, it's a mechanical process and it's a mathematical process. How do I get myself in front of X number of people every day? And then you execute on it, right? And so you can do that in any number of ways. Content marketing, we talked about content repurposing. Prior to going live. So it's all those kinds of tactics that you can then get into that become effective when you have a congruent message and you project a very clear signal out into the market.

Yeah.

Well, a lot of people jump right into the tactics first and they find they're not resonating with anybody and it's not working. Then they have to step back and go, what's wrong here? Right?

Yeah.

So I think the mechanical part of getting your name out That's all, you know, it's all execution at that point. And I think it's just outreach. It's like, okay, how many podcasts do I want to appear on? Well, there's a mathematical quotient to that. It might be if I reach out to 100 podcasts, I might get booked on 5 of them, right? So like, you just go through the mechanical process of reaching out and becoming a guest.

But as you say, Rocky, it really starts, if you like, it starts internally, doesn't it? Otherwise, you find yourself 3, 6 months, or even years down the line in a relationship with a brand that you're no longer committed to. So that, as you say, that sort of honesty and integrity around your sense of purpose is really key. So thanks for explaining that really in such an articulate and both emotional and practical way. If people would like to find out more about you, Rocky, how can they do that?

Sure. The best way to find out about me is to go to my website at rockybuckley.com. And on there, you'll be able to find out more about my Power Persona framework and my membership community, Platinum Path Masterminds. And also, if you want to work with me one-on-one, you can find out about that on my site as well.

Rocky, thank you so much for sharing today on such a, you know, an essentially important issue, but also one for all of us that are career entrepreneurs that are moving from company to company over time. It's a constant challenge to reinvent ourselves and yet to maintain remain relevant to both ourselves and to our market. So thank you so much for coming on The Unnoticed Entrepreneur today.

Oh, absolutely. Thank you, Jim. You know, you are the one thing, the one constant over the years of change. So focusing on yourself and becoming that best version of yourself is really where it's all at. So thank you so much, Jim. I really appreciate being here.

Well, it's my pleasure. And, you know, I couldn't top the way you just explained that about really just trying to turn up and be the best version of ourselves every day. So you've been listening to Rocky Buckley, whose details of course I'll put in the show notes, and me, Jim James, your fellow Unnoticed Entrepreneur coming from the UK. Thank you so much for listening to this episode, and if you've enjoyed it, do please share it with a fellow entrepreneur and review it, and also go and check out Rocky Buckley's website. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of The Unnoticed Entrepreneur.