How To Transform From A Personal Brand To A Valuable and Sellable Brand | Ryan Deiss

Don't tell anybody how you do what you do because then they won't need you anymore. You want them coming up to you. The problem with that is, is if you're the one they want, you never really get a day off. You can't really take a vacation. And what you got really isn't sellable. Now maybe you're thinking, that's fine, I'll write a book. I've written a book. I love books. I think books are great. I think just about everybody in this room should have a book. If you don't have one, they're good for business. It's a good marketing tool. But this is not.

What I'm referring to is the name of your business. Your name. Is your name, your brand. Amazon wasn't called Jeff Bezos and Associates. Microsoft wasn't named Bill Gates and Partners. I didn't call Genius Network Joe Polish's network. Far too many entrepreneurs are creating a brand built around themselves and as a result get trapped in their own business and getting stressed and exhausted as a result. What if you shifted your role from guru to spokesperson for your brand? Not only can that free you up time wise and energy wise, it can vastly increase your company's value as a sellable brand. That's why I've asked Ryan Deiss to share his personal experience in moving from guru to spokesperson for his brand. Ryan was his guru brand until he turned it into Digital Marketer. Since doing so, he's grown his paid membership at Digital marketer to over 10,000 members and over 10 million in reoccurring revenue. Plus now Ryan doesn't even produce any of the content. As a result of this shift, he recently sold one of his sub brands for a large eight figure deal to a company backed by Blackstone, the second largest private equity firm in the world. Ryan's title is Guru to how to transform from a personal brand to. To a valuable and sellable brand. Please welcome my dear friend and very handsome fellow, Ryan Deiss.

Very handsome.

Very handsome.

So it's handsome and this will probably be pretty good. Thanks Joe. Appreciate that. Yeah. My name is Ryan, CEO of DigitalMarketer.com and. Exactly. I want to talk to you about how to transform from a personal brand from a guru brand into a a profitable, scalable and if you want to, sellable brand. Brand. Now obviously you don't have to do this if you don't want to, but if you want to, it's kind of a cool thing to know how to do. So that's what we're going to talk about. Now, there's a big problem, and I guess this is the reason that I want to talk about this today. It's a disease that I see infecting so many of my friends in the entrepreneurial world today. And I call it Guru Itis. And it's literally every single CEO I know wants to be the next Tony. Now, there's nothing wrong with this. If this is what you want, that's fine. But in my experience, what so many people don't realize, the big challenge with Guru itis is while very often you look really successful on the outside, inside you're stressed beyond belief because you're thinking, like, how do I maintain this facade? I gotta look like I got my stuff together, right? And really, I'm kind of screwed up like everybody else, right? You're also exhausted because you're the one doing all the work, right? You're out there doing everything. There's only so much that you can have other people do. And the worst thing is you're trapped, right? You're trapped. You're trapped because you are the business. Worse, you're trapped because you are the product. My business partner, Roland Frazier, who you saw up here earlier today, he calls. That refers to that having a dancing bear business, right? You're the dancing bear. And when the bear stops dancing, the bear stops getting paid. All right? So my goal, my hope, is to at least give you a path, give you an option to de gurufying your business again if you want to. I know many of you would actually, though you don't like to admit it, would much rather be famous than rich. And that's cool. That's cool. But if you're like me and you're mostly in it for the money, then I want to show you how you can build a business transition away from a pure guru in. Into a business that's maybe a little bit more sellable. Now, where I came from, definitely I've been doing this since 1999, made my first sale online in 99, and have kind of started out in the guru space. I mean, I was running stupid ads like this, talking about, look at me, I'll build your funnel. So I went from doing jackassy kind of stuff like that to, with the help from a lot of smart people, launching the helping to launch the brand digitalmarketer.com, which, thankfully is relatively well known by enough people to keep my family fed. And it's now a real company and everything. And it's a company that thankfully has value outside of me. It's a company that if tomorrow we wanted to sell it, my partners and I would make probably more money than we needed for a while, right? Not Roland. If you know Roland, he spends all his money on way too expensive wines. He'd be done in like a month or two. But Perry and I'd pretty much be fine. And so, again, this is what we've been able to roll out and do. So I just want to talk to you about kind of the process of what we went through. If you want to follow a similar path, step number one is you need to materialize your genius. You need to productize your genius. You need to take the voodoo that you do so well, and you need to somehow extract it from your brain, from your general awesomeness, and you need to put it over here. It needs to kind of become separate from you. In other words, you need to not do what a lot of people talk about doing, which is black boxing. Everything that you know. And I see this done. I see this talk. Like, if you want to be the expert, you're the guru on the top of the mountain. Don't tell anybody how you do what you do, because then they won't need you anymore. You want them coming up to you. The problem with that is, is if you're the one they want, you never really get a day off. You can't really take a vacation. And what you got really isn't sellable. Now maybe you're thinking, that's fine, I'll write a book. I've written a book. I love books. I think books are great. I think just about everybody in this room should have a book. If you don't have one, they're good for business. It's a good marketing tool. But this is not what I'm referring to.

Hey, I hope you're enjoying this video. And I want to let you know that I have a new book that's come out. And if you'd like to get it absolutely free, there's a link below in the description. Or you can wait till the end of this video, or you can Simply go to joe'sfreebook.com and you can get a copy there.

Primarily because no one in the history of the world has actually finished a book. Do you realize that, like, nobody's actually ever read a book? People buy books and they put them up on shelves and they look really nice. But in general, sadly, human beings don't read and finish books. So if we want to get our knowledge out of our head, we want to put it somewhere where it can be transferred then. I'm not talking about a book. I'm not talking about writing the bible of your industry. I'm really talking about what's your ten Commandments? Okay, what is your ten commandments? I came across this accidentally. I remember I was at a really low point in my business career, and I kind of scribbled down on a napkin one day. Here's generally what I know to be true about how my business works. I know that I want to bring some leads in, and somebody will buy something small, and then I'll upsell them something a little bit bigger. This napkin that I wrote, which now is framed and in my office, I now refer to as the million dollar napkin. It's a super corny name, but this napkin is actually what planted the seeds of digital marketer. We first started teaching and talking about this idea of the napkin model. Go from a lead magnet to a tripwire to a core offer to a profit maximizer. This five step funnel concept is. Has anybody else heard of this? Yeah, that's where it started. It was an accident, but it was the first time I took something that I had and I said, you know what? I'm gonna place it over here. I'm gonna let it stand separate from me. That was when things started to take off. People started to adopt it as their own. The napkin became customer value optimization. Now it's a flowchart. Now I'm beginning to see people print these out. They're making posters out of them, putting them up on their wall, and then eventually became an actual tool that people could use to figure out what's the process of turning strangers into friends, into customers, into raving fans. And that's the customer value journey. Now. You know you've nailed it. You know you've got it right. You know that people are really beginning to adopt your framework when they're doing stuff like this, all right? When they are taking your framework, when they're taking your concept, they're printing them out, they're turning them into posters. That is when you have it. That is when this genius that is yours can now be consumed by someone else. They feel like it can be theirs. Now, the important thing I want you to keep in mind, to pull this off, you must fully transfer your genius onto the artifact. Okay? You must fully transfer your genius onto the artifact. It must hold the power, or you will remain trapped. So when people say, oh, you're so smart, you're so great, no, no, I just do what I talk about on that napkin thing. It's not about me. It's about that. You have to learn to redirect the attention away from you and onto the artifact if you want to be free. Does that make sense? It can't be about you. This can be the hardest thing in the world to do. But if you want to be free, it's got to be about the thing that can be transferred and your brain ain't that. So my first question for you, I'm gonna have three Question number one. What's your ten Commandments? What's your napkin? How do you materialize? How do you productize your genius? That's step one. Step two, we need to profitize your message. That's not a word. Made it up. What do I mean by profitize? Well, I don't mean profit P R O F. I mean P R, O, P, H. And the question I have for you is, are you a prophet or are you a God? Are you a prophet or are you the God of your brand? How have you positioned yourself in your business with your brand? I want to kind of take you back, and I want to show you some of the homepages for DigitalMarketer.com and I want to see if you notice any themes. So this is kind of where Digital Marketer started. Not bad looking. Then for some reason, we got worse. Not really sure how that happened. Then we got a little bit better, right? And then we decided, oh, maybe we should capture some leads. So we did that. And this is kind of where we sit today, right now, throughout all the different changes, one thing has remained consistent. This jackass has not graced the top of the homepage. Right. My face hasn't been at the top of the homepage. And I would submit to you that if your mug is at the top of your homepage, you are likely positioning yourself as the God of your brand and not a profit for your brand. Now, this is where I want to kind of pause for a little bit, and let's talk about what's the role? Right? What should your role be? Let's think about the Ten Commandments, Moses coming down from Mount Sinai. Even if you haven't read the book, you've probably seen the movie, right? Charlton Heston, long beard. So up here at the top of the mountain, that's God, okay? That's not you. Now, I know that's gonna be hard news for some of you to swallow, all right? That's not you. And the reality is you don't want that to be you, because God doesn't get a day off. Right. God doesn't get to take a vacation. Who are you? You're the messenger. You're the prophet. You are the guide. You are the one coming down with the tablets, which is your message saying, I have the good news. You are the messenger bringing that to your customers. So the question that I have for you, that I want you to ponder, this is question 2 of 3. Are you currently positioned as the profit for your brand or the God of your brand? Profit for your brand or God of your brand, how are you positioned? Step three, we need to deputize other true believers. So we've crafted our message. We've separated it from us. We've begun to to be the profit of our brand. Now it is time to gather others to the cause. It is time to make disciples of all nations. Right? So we need to deputize other true believers for us. At Digital Marketer, we did this formally with our certified partner program. We said, let's certify agencies and consultants to teach our stuff. Most people would never do this. Have somebody else teach my content. That's my content. They'll never do it as well as I can. Some do it not as well. Some do it better. Recently, one of our certified partners pitched our stuff into Southwest Airlines. I don't know anybody from Southwest Airlines. They did. Right? We have them taking it into other nations in different languages that I don't speak because I'm only kind of good at one of them. So that's one of the ways that we did it. Another way that we did it is at our event, Traffic and Conversion Summit. I remember Traffic and Conversion Summit one. I was on the stage all three days. Even when I wasn't speaking. I was terrified that somebody was gonna say something that went against something that I said. So I made sure I was on the stage, monitoring them. Like sitting there in a stool just judging them. Right. The most recent Traffic and Conversion Summit. The most recent Traffic Conversion Summit. Three talks, which is about three more than I actually wanted to do instead. I wanted to make room for our customers. I wanted to make room for our members. I wanted to make room for our certified partners. I wanted to make room for our customers and all the other folks over there, our team, our employees. I want to make room for them to come up there for those messengers. Now, I know what you're saying. Yeah. But if I make room and all these people come up, what if they leave? What if I make messengers of people? I make gurus of other people, and they leave. I want to show you one other Picture this is me on stage hugging a banana. The man in the banana suit's Russ Henneberry. The rest of the team there is Lindsey Suzie. And you can see the top of Molly's head at this event. These four people who are critical team members to Digital Marketer, all spoke and were featured prominently on our stage today. None of them work for us anymore. They've all gone on to do other things. They've all gone on to do other things. They left the right way, love them to death, miss them terribly. But the brand goes on. The company goes on. The messengers have changed, but the message remains the same. The messengers have changed, but the message remains the same. So I want you to write this down. When you let go, you make room for others to take hold. If you grasp onto everything that's yours and you claim it as your own, and you don't let anybody else have anything to do with it, you know what? There's not room for them to get hold. When you let go, you create room for others to take hold. And you know it's working when people start sticking your logo on their stuff. I'm proud of the fact that I've walked into coffee shops all over the world and I've seen people with our logo on their computer. That's crazy to me. But it's because we let go and let them take hold. So the final question I have for you is, who do you know who could help spread your message? Who on your team could be spreading your message? Which customers could you certify to let them talk about your stuff? Who could share in spreading your message, knowing they won't do it as well as you, but knowing that they'll get the message out to more. So just to review, materialize your genius, separate it from you. Have it be something that's transferable, that's passable, prophetize your role, deputize other messengers. And the final action item that I would have for you, I would ask you to mentally shift your role from guru to the world's best spokesperson for your brand. Mentally shift your role from guru to the world's best spokesperson for your brand. Will any of you in the room do this? Yeah. If you will please repeat after me. I am not my company. My company does not own me. I own my company. Say it again. You own the company. The company doesn't own you. That's what I wanted you to hear. Thank you.

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