Unlocking the Secrets of Building a Personal Brand, Business Acquisitions, and Getting Noticed

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Hello and welcome to this episode of The Unnoticed Entrepreneur with me, Jim James. And today we are going all the way to Phoenix, Arizona to talk to Christian Espinoza, who's a multiple-time entrepreneur, book author, and creator of the book called The Smartest Person in the Room. Christian, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me on, Jim. Looking forward to our conversation.

Well, me too, because, you know, you've created multiple businesses. I think you mentioned 8 businesses, and we're going to talk about a number of things, including why a personal brand is so important for a serial entrepreneur, and you're going to tell us how you've done it, and also some lessons you've learned in building a cybersecurity company in the medical devices business, which you sold successfully after only 5 years of running it. So lots for us to learn from you today, Christian. First of all, you're a serial entrepreneur, and looking at your branded website, tell us, why do you think an entrepreneur needs a personal brand, and how should we go about building it?

I think there's a number of reasons. One is if you build up a company and sell the company, then that brand goes away. So you're kind of starting over if you don't already have your personal brand and personal website. The other reason is forward thinking. A lot of entrepreneurs have a message or a vision. So if you've already created a personal brand and you want to write a book, then you can leverage the contacts you've got along your journey. And then you've already created a little bit of a following, especially if you launch a book, you can other things that are tied in my own journey versus the companies I have created or am creating now.

So Christian, I love the idea that as an entrepreneur, you've got a journey and then you start, you know, businesses and move on from them as you go along. How do you recommend that an entrepreneur doesn't distract from the business that they're building with their personal brand? Obviously, we've got with Musk and Twitter, you know, how a personal brand can detract from the performance of the company brand. How have you accomplished that?

I'm a believer that a business is a reflection of the entrepreneur. So I think if your personal brand is aligned with your business, it shouldn't be a problem. I think sometimes we want to go too personal, you know, I guess it's called a personal brand, but we want to go maybe a little bit too personal or behind the scenes on things. But it's still a professional image you're projecting, not Your private Facebook page that you share with your intimate friends. So I think people need to keep that in mind. And then like one of the struggles I had is when I sold my business to a publicly traded company, there was a lot of scrutiny on things and they would scrutinize my personal brand. So I had to stop doing a lot of the personal promotion because they thought it was detracting away from the parent company. So things like that do come up. And it's just a matter of being aware, are the actions you're taking with your personal brand helping or hurting your businesses? And I thought they were helping the parent company because it helped with marketing and brand exposure, but they had a different opinion.

Yeah. And I guess there's a time when people are no longer buying the founder, they're buying the product, right? The company buys your company with all the IP and so on. That's kind of a recognition that you are separate now as a brand. between yourself and the products you're selling. Let's just go back to that company you set up. Can you share with us some of the experiences and some of the learnings you've got from building a business as a startup and then exiting from a communications perspective for this show?

One of the things I did not do well is when I first started the cybersecurity company, I took pretty much every client. I just thought any revenue is good revenue. So I wanted to be something to everyone, basically. And I realized that I was commoditizing myself, basically. And then people were only going to work with us if we lowered our price to a certain point because we became a commodity. So I took some time to reflect and I decided to niche our focus down to medical device cybersecurity. It's very specific. There's not a lot of players in that niche. It's more of a blue ocean strategy versus the red ocean strategy I was kind of following before. And once I did that and we dialed in our messaging, we landed a contract with that and we're able to leverage that experience. And we focused on our website and inbound leads. That really helped us take the next leap in growth because we focused on that one specific industry.

Christian, first of all, do tell us the name of the company if you can for those people that might recognize it, but also Can you just give us an example of how the messaging changed when you were going from, as you say, red ocean to blue ocean? Can you give us an example?

Yeah, the company that I started was called Alpine Security. An example, for instance, we offered penetration testing to everybody, all industries, and that's very broad. But when I narrowed it down to medical device manufacturers, I used this framework called the StoryBrand framework, where it forces you to understand like who your character is, who your customer is, what the real problems they have, you know, the external problems, the internal problems, the philosophical problems. And it positions you as a guide to come in and help them solve that problem. But you have the empathy and the authority and the understanding of the problem. And then you give them a plan and you help transform them. To make them successful. But if you walk through that framework, it really forces you to think through what it's like to be in your target audience's head, the specific individual you're gonna be dealing with that's gonna make this decision, and what things that they need to hear from you or for you to deliver to make them comfortable taking that step forward with you. This framework is really used in a lot of movies such as Star Wars. For instance, my company would be like Yoda and the client would be like Luke Skywalker.

So.

He has a problem and we're here to guide him. But Luke is the hero of the story, just like the client is the hero of your story as well. Not you. A lot of companies like to brag about how great they are, but this is kind of the opposite approach. Trying to make our clients awesome by being that trusted advisor and giving them the plan and the guide.

Great. Is it Donald Miller, I think, isn't it, who wrote the book StoryBrand Framework?

That's correct. Yeah.

This idea of the hero's journey. As you say, people like Park Howell are doing this story of the business is becoming really quite significant. But as you say, you've got to niche down, haven't you, first? Otherwise your story is so bland.

I'm sorry, just like when you said that, I just remember in college, I went to the Air Force Academy in the US, I take all these classes, we always joke around that we're so well-rounded, we have no point. It's kind of the same thing in business. You don't want to be that well-rounded.

That's a great expression. You're so well-rounded, you have no point. That's a fantastic way of looking at it. So Christian, How quickly did the business turn around once you decided to do medical device security? Did that take years to get traction from a messaging point of view to getting inbound?

It wasn't years. It was gradual. It wasn't like a light switch that just flipped on. Within a year, I would say we gained a lot of traction. So once we got one big client, we asked for referrals from them because it's a small industry. And then we focused a lot on the website. You know, once you understood that hero's journey, the pain points, the requirements, what the problems we're trying to solve, we could write blogs about that or speak about that. And that resulted in us becoming like ranked number 1 in Google when somebody typed in medical device cybersecurity, which I am a massive fan of inbound leads. They're much more effective than like outbound reach.

Really, really interesting. As you say, once you define the journey for your customer, you could write the content from their perspective, right? Rather than writing your own narrative or even wondering what to write. Often people aren't sure what to write next. And I think what you're saying is that the customer's journey gives you some clues on what you could be writing or making videos about.

100%. Yes, it gives you clarity, the challenges that they're facing and what they're trying to get resolved and what they're day looks like and how they feel about things and what would make them feel better.

Now, you've also written a book about helping people with high IQ overcome low EQ. Do you want to just share with us about that? Because B2B tech sales are famously fraught because you have sophisticated products, sophisticated pre-sales consultants and engineers, and clients on the other side who by and large, are not at the same level of knowledge, right, about the tech and the implementation. You've written a book, Christian, that kind of helps people in high-tech companies to overcome some of the bottlenecks. Do you want to share with us about what you experienced and what the book solves?

In my cybersecurity company, I hired people based on their technical aptitude. I thought that's pretty much what mattered. And I realized when I zoomed out and kind of reflected on the problems I was having in my organization, problems with clients and problems internally, most of those were not because of a lack of technical aptitude. They were because of a lack of people skills. And in my industry and other high-tech industries, we've sort of like accepted that if you're super smart with technology, it's okay that you're not smart or good with people at all. And that creates a lot of problems. So in Alpine Security, I worked to solve that by implementing weekly training. I had people come in and talk about communication, how to have crucial conversations, emotional intelligence, neurolinguistic programming, a lot of different tactics and techniques that we went over to solve that problem in my company because we had clients that we would get as a one-time project, but they wouldn't sign on for an annual contract. I think because they were happy, like technically with what we delivered, but they weren't like wowed by our experience with them. So once I got all this stuff implemented in the company, my team was better at communicating with clients. And a lot of our clients became annual clients instead of like individual projects because they enjoyed working with us more.

That is fascinating. Also quite sophisticated understanding then of the bottleneck in the business. From a practical point of view, you talk about NLP and so on. Structurally, what did you do from knowledge management perspective? Because training takes place, but behaviors and having content shared— Christian, can you help us how you've made that, if you like, part of the organizational culture rather than just sort of a one-off training?

So, I implemented my core values. I also realized that most of the problems I had in the company were a lack of core value alignment. I used to think core values were just taglines big companies put on the wall.

Yeah.

I do a lot of reflection. I think as an entrepreneur, it's important to zoom out of the scenario and look at the forest and look at where you're going and look at what the obstacles are. And for me, I realized it wasn't just the people's lack of people skills. It was also, I found frustrating when people didn't do certain things, and those certain things were the things that I valued. So, I wasn't making hiring decisions based on a good cultural fit or alignment with my core values. I was just making them based on, oh, this person checks all the boxes technically. So when I was able to make that shift and start hiring people based on the core value alignment and then enforce that culture in the organization, then things started to get better. But it, it's not like it organically just happens. You have to, as a leader in the company, enforce it. Like one of my core values, for instance, was to listen carefully and respond clearly. If I have a salesperson that's not listening to the client and the problem they're saying, they're out of alignment with the core value. And somebody, typically me, had to say, hey, salesperson X or whatever, after a call, you weren't following our core values and we're probably going to lose that sale as a result.

How interesting. And then you said that you were hiring and asking people to give an example. Could you give us an example? It'd be really useful from a practical point of view to know what that would look like. Yeah.

As an example, one of our core values is own the problem, find the solution. That's one of them. So we would ask someone to describe a scenario where they ran into a problem and how they handled it and just see how they responded. We leave it pretty open. And the whole idea is if they didn't show any ownership of the problem and they just said, well, I had this problem, I just kind of threw my hands up. sort of like pointed externally for the solution versus taking ownership of it, then we realized that, you know, they're probably not a good fit, or we'd have to ask a follow-on question for a little more clarity.

Here's a question for you then, Christian. You talk about writing on the external content, on the blogs and the videos around the customer's journey. How did you reflect these values in your marketing materials, for example? How did you share with your clients and potential clients the values within the company they might encounter?

Yeah, we shared the core values on our website. We shared them just by the way my staff carried themselves. I think that came across on our reports, on our meetings, on our organization. So, it's like the core values should be part of everything in the organization, and it should be obvious based on interactions with my company that we value these certain things. Otherwise, if they can't see that or feel that, it's not being implemented properly.

You managed to get the company acquired, for which congratulations. Could you give us an answer about how you went around finding the acquisition, or did they come to you?

Yeah, that's an interesting question. So when I started the company, I'm kind of one of those ready, fire, aim people. I just take steps and start doing things. I didn't really have a great plan when I started the company. The couple years before I sold the company, I hired a consultant to do what's called a one-page strategic plan for the company, which sort of regimented the goals and the messaging, the sandbox we wanted to play in, our key performance indicators, all of that. And I don't know if it was because of that. And how we kind of showed up and were organized as an organization after that. But people started reaching out to looking to buy the company, like within a year after we got really super organized. And I wasn't sure what I wanted to do, if I wanted to sell the company. But at this point it was December 2020. I'd gone through COVID and had to lay off some people and I started entertaining the offers, uh, a lot of the time just to understand what people were looking for. I just wanted to talk to them. It's kind of like doing an interview. I think you should interview with everybody to kind of get a feel for interviews. When the offer came in from CISO Global, it just felt like it was a good offer. It was a stock offer, not like a big cash upfront, but it gave me an opportunity to join a company that was going public and go through that experience as well. I knew the CEO of the company, but indirectly through some other people, and it just seemed to align appropriately.

Okay, that's a wonderful story, a really elegant way to move on as well. Christian Espinosa joining me from Phoenix, Arizona. In terms of getting noticed, what would you say would be the one piece of advice you'd give?

I would say to focus on your messaging, and I'm sure there's other frameworks out there. The one I use is the Donald Miller one, the StoryBrand framework. Just to walk through that really forces you to understand Your client, their problems, how to have empathy for the problems, how to establish yourself with authority, what success looks like for them, what failure looks like for them, and, you know, how obviously you can provide the bridge to get there as a guide, but they're still the hero of the story. I think walking through that, that was the most important thing I did that helped get us that business once we dialed the messaging.

Christian, thank you so much for sharing that. It's a great reminder of just how powerful the story is and putting your client as the hero of your own business story, just how important that is. Christian, if you want to find out more about you, where can they do that?

christianspinosa.com. That's my website. That's probably the best place. And I'm also on LinkedIn and all social media. My book is on Amazon and Audible as well.

Wonderful. And of course, I'll put links to Christian in my show notes. So Christian, thanks for coming on the show and sharing your wisdom with myself and my fellow Unnoticed Entrepreneurs today. Thank you so much.

Yeah, thank you, Jim. I appreciate it.

So we've been listening to Christian Espinoza, successful serial entrepreneur who's been sharing about how he's used really the power of story and communicating that, plus on the inside of the business, the power of values and values alignment within the team. I'll share this, of course, on the show notes and put contact details as well in the links. And until we meet again, if you could share this with a fellow entrepreneur, review the show if you get a chance. It really helps us. And until we meet again, just implore you to keep on communicating. Now I'd just like to mention our sponsor for this show. The Unnoticed Entrepreneur podcast is sponsored by a company called Prowly. Prowly is an all-in-one software for leveraging your public relations activities. You can boost the media relations game for your business find media contacts, send out press releases, and get more coverage while saving time and money on everyday tasks. Check it out, prowly.com.