If You Focus On These TWO Words, Your Business Will DRAMATICALLY Change

Don't spend all your money, kid, because it's really, really hard to make money and it's 10 times harder to keep it. I think that was one of them. And I think the other one was, you know, it's all about the numbers. There's only two ways to do business. Increase sales or decrease cost. That's it. And don't do anything because it's an ego play. Increase sales or decrease cost. That's it. And those things probably have been the ones and everybody else knows all the other ones. Of course, do what you love. Of course, do your research and everything else. But the room knows that.

I got a question for you, though, that I think will help kickstart everything.

So imagine that I'm like, I own a business doing well, but I know I don't have my marketing, especially my branding and positioning. I see a lot of people, a lot of authors we work with who have good businesses and their branding and positioning is bad. And through the book process, we have.

To actually unpack that a little bit.

Which is not what our process was designed to do. It just kind of happens. But if I'm in that position, successful business, my positioning marketing is not what I want it to be. My brand and my message.

Where do I even start thinking about that? Because a lot of them I see.

They'Re almost overwhelmed thinking about anything about messaging or branding. So what do I do? Walk me through the thought process. Yeah, for sure. And Tucker's being modest because he's legit, One of the best in the world I've ever seen at this. So love Jim and Tucker on this. He said three things. Marketing, branding, and positioning. And actually another one, messaging. So start with positioning. And this is where Tucker starts with all of his authors. A lot of you have worked with Scribe. If any of you haven't, before he starts with any author, he says, what's the positioning? And the simplest way to start positioning is opposite adjectives and an XY graph. So you all have paper in front of you. Draw a vertical line and a horizontal line. Positioning is the beginning of all marketing. And for positioning, you want to own opposite adjectives. So I'll give you a simple example. If I say, what are the two competitors to, let's say the post office, who would you say? FedEx and UPS. Exactly. FedEx and UPS. So draw a vertical line and then draw a horizontal line. You want to choose opposite adjectives for your business, and we're going to do it for FedEx, UPS and the Postal service. Opposite adjectives are adjectives. Like fast and slow, expensive and cheap. Exclusive and open. Ted, the TED conference is very exclusive. Toastmasters or even TEDx is fairly open. These aren't right or wrong. The idea is not to choose the right one. The idea is to choose two opposite adjectives so that you're in a quadrant completely by yourself. So FedEx owns fast and expensive. There's an arrow in the FedEx logo to remind you that they're fast and they're happy to own expensive. If I need to mail a Rolex to Tucker and it's got to be in Austin by tomorrow, I'm not using the Postal Service. They own fast and expensive and they're happy to. Now the Postal Service is happy to own slow and cheap, the exact opposite of fast and expensive. If I'm going to mail a birthday card to my grandma and I'm a week early, which I never am, I could just buy a stamp and take it to the Postal Service. So, yes, they're competitors, but they're really not competitors at all because FedEx is over here and the Postal Service is down here. Now, when you do this, most entrepreneurs, they get all excited about doing this exercise and then they choose opposite adjectives. We're amazing and they suck. We're awesome and they're terrible. No, the positioning graph has to. You basically should be able to hand it to your competitor and have them go, yeah, the Postal Service knows they're cheaper and slower than FedEx, and FedEx knows they're faster. So that's positioning. And there's a whole book. Jack Reese and Al Trout. It's kind of fascinating, the book. It's one of the best marketing books of all time. If you want to go down the rabbit hole. But that's the summary of the book, is that XY axis and opposite adjectives. Plot yourself and all of your direct competitors on that and then say, how are you different? And what two words do you want to own? And with a personal brand, we can go into personal branding. If you want personal brand, you want to own one word, right? So, like, if I say, who is the vulnerability woman? Who would that be? Brene Brown. Exactly. If I was like, who's the hustle guy?

Gary.

Gary and the Four Hour guy, Tim Ferriss, Right? You all know their name with just their word. So with a personal brand, you want to own one word. With positioning your business, you want to own opposite adjectives. So two words. Does that make sense? Awesome. Positioning. Positioning the Battle for your Mind by Al Rees and Jack Trout.

Very good book.

Incredible book. Yeah, but the funny thing about that book is it's written in the early 80s and he talks all about how many marketing messages we're being bombarded with and how busy the world is and how distracted we all are. And it came out in like 82.

Right?

What else? Who's got another question on market? Oh, so that's, so that's positioning branding. I mean, we could spend a whole week here on branding. But branding, in a word, is the collective feeling of what people feel and know about your brand. So a brand is not a logo, it's not a color palette, it's everything all rolled into one. But this, again, this is a room full of expert direct marketers with branding. Tesla sold 21. Tesla's revenue was over $21 billion last year. And they do not buy ads. Tesla has never bought an ad and they did 21 billion. That's because they built a brand. Yeti coolers built a billion dollar company selling a product that nobody needed. If you think about a cooler, everybody know Yeti coolers, the white 10 years ago, yeti, yeah, they saw a problem, et cetera, et cetera. But nobody had sandwiches that were spoiling, nobody's beer was getting warm. YETI came around and they solved a problem that we didn't even know we had, which is we weren't proud to brag about our cooler. Nobody had a cooler problem. Everybody had a story about their cooler problem. Because if you're the toughest fishing and hunting guide and you're a group of 10 people, you're not going to brag about your $33 Coleman five day cooler. That, guess what works fine. We worry too much about the product and the features and the benefits and not enough about the story and what I call a portable story. So Yeti created a cooler. Sure, it's three times better. So it should cost $100 compared to the Coleman, that works fine. But it costs $300. That additional $200 in the price is the story. It's because a Yeti cooler is worth bragging about. And then they have brand extensions and can buy, can sell $30 mugs for people who can't afford the $300 cooler. But they can get the mug that's worth bragging about. Does that make sense? So if you don't know what store, if you don't know how your customers are talking about your product, if you don't know how your story about your business is spreading, it's not. So what I love to do is think about and we can Do Hot seat. We can pick out anyone and say, when people talk about your business or what are they saying? And you can't use our fancy copywriting marketing terms. You have to say, like what they would say in human language at the bar. Right. So take Tucker and Scribe. A business I know pretty well.

They.

Turn ideas into books. So the way people talk about them is, I've had this idea for a book for a long time. I just can't get it out of my head. And then I worked with Scribe, and it's cool. I didn't have to write. They just interviewed me and pulled it out of me. That kind of language. Know your customer's words and how your customer talks about your business.

I went and grabbed all these books. Cause it's so funny. Here's the different versions of positioning. This is the 20th anniversary edition, which was years ago still. And then, you know, they've got the origin of brand, same author.

Incredible.

And then the 22 immutable laws of marketing.

These are all absolute goals.

Yeah, these are. Yeah.

All out.

What's funny about these guys? This is one of their books that it didn't do as well as the other one. It's called Horse Sense. How to Pull Ahead of the Business Track. And one of the promises behind this is they say, in spite of what many people will say about success, a lot of success is just simply riding the right horse, you know, is latching on to someone who's like, making shit happen.

Yeah, yeah.

And it's, you know.

Yeah, for sure. And those opposite adjectives. So we'll take Joe and Genius Network. We're all here. The opposite tips for that. We never talked about it. We don't know what they are. But one of them could be. Because there's a lot of masterminds you can join.

Right.

One of them could be, it's super fun and it's super generous. I've been parts of masterminds that are, you know, there's the okay content, but everyone's kind of eyes on their own paper. And they're trying to get the most value so they can take it away. And they see it as competitors. This is super generous, super sharing. You guys are all helping each other work with each other. And it's fun. Joe is a fun person. This entire everything around us is fun. Right. So those may not be the exact ones, but if someone said to Kathy, if someone said, I'm thinking about joining Genius Network versus a different mastermind, what makes Genius Network different fun? Generous. There's a hundred Other adjectives you could use. Yeah. Fun. Yeah.

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 joesfreebook.com and you can get a copy there. So you've helped a lot of people with their books. You know a tremendous amount about not just book marketing and words and titles and headlines and everything, but even the reasoning behind why. I mean, you go beyond why are you writing a book?

Right.

And a lot of people think if I write a book, that's going to answer my prayers. But that's just the start. Right?

Right.

And in many cases, people would be.

Better served to figure out what the.

Hell they want to do with the book before they even write the book, you know, so what advice could you give of what you've learned with helping people maximize what? The creation of writing a book, having a book written. What are the things that you have seen that and have done for clients that have helped the most?

Yeah, a book is in 2020, other than a TED talk that happens to go viral like Simon Sinek, a well written book is one of the largest, strongest pillars in building your personal brand. And I know some of you don't want to build a personal brand because you think you don't like Instagram or you don't want to try TikTok. It's not about the platforms. It's about owning a word. And, and there's lots of ways to do that. We did the Gary Vee's hustle, Simon Sinek's why Susan Cain is Introvert, Brene Brown is vulnerability. What is the word that you want to own in your personal brand? Personal brand. And this is one of those things. Like I said, this room is amazing. Direct marketers. But brand, direct marketing is I put a dollar in the top and $2 comes out the bottom or even $1.10. That's fine. Brand, you don't know, like, you don't get an immediate return. It's not measurable in a funnel when it comes to books. A book is one of what I call the bricks in the wall of your personal brand. So once you know your word and what word or phrase or even opposite adjectives you want to own for your brand. And it's okay. Like if you're building a business around coaching, it's okay if your word is vulnerability and that Brene Brown already has that. Brene Brown doesn't have time to coach everyone in America. She doesn't even really do coaching. So it's okay if your word is taken, but. But from a positioning perspective, it's obviously better if it's unique and you sort of own it. A book I love. So what Tucker's built with Scribe. There used to be gatekeepers in our world, and the gatekeepers have all left in the last 10 years. The gatekeepers are gone. Gatekeepers are huge. Traditional publishers, music agents, comedy agents, everything else. Look at the brands Justin Bieber was discovered on YouTube. The gatekeepers have left the building. And nowadays the gatekeepers, there's some that are still left. Publishers have consolidated, right? Some of the big fancy buildings still exist in New York City. But the thing about gatekeepers is they don't want you until you don't need them. And that's why Scribe is an amazing company, because the gatekeepers of traditional publishing, they're only interested in you. It's funny because Tucker and I have seen this a thousand times. An author writes, a proposal, goes to a traditional publisher. The author's wondering how the big publisher portfolio, or Penguin or whoever, Simon Schuster is going to market and sell the books. Guess what? The publisher is wondering how the author is going to market and sell the books because they don't know how. So building your personal brand. And don't get hung up on Instagram or email lists or tactics or oh, my God, gary vee's using community.com now I got to use Community, right? That's the hot new thing. It's not about a platform. It's about owning the words. And a book is the strongest, biggest pillar in your personal brand. Twenty years ago, Tom Peters said talked about personal branding. He said, our most important job is to be the CEO of ME Inc. And the importance of building your personal brand. He said this 20 years ago when Google was called Backrub. Literally, look it up. I have a slide of it. It's a black and white picture of a hand on somebody's back. Because Google tracked backlinks and before they came up with the name Google, it was called backrub. In 1997, Tom Peters, as usual, way ahead of his time, saying the importance of personal branding was before Twitter or Instagram even existed. So I would challenge you guys. Don't get hung up on, I don't need to build a personal brand because I'm not good at the platforms or the tools. Think about owning a Word. And then building your bricks in the wall that can be social proof, Testimonials, media articles, etc. And then another little rant on this. People get really excited nowadays if they get the chance to write for Inc. Or Fast Company or whatever. Do it once if you want to do it once. So that when you put as seen in ink on your website, it's legitimate and true. And then never do it again. And then also repurpose that on your own site, on medium, on blog, you are working for free for them. And positioning wise, you know what they're going to say. Oh, it's great to have a column in such a prestigious magazine as Ink magazine. No, it was prestigious when they made it with paper and ink because it was scarce. Now they will take anybody. And anyone can write for Ink online. Right. Not in the print one. If you can get a cover magazine cover of Fast Company on the Ink actually turns me.

Hold on.

Yeah, but you're right.

Yeah.

Talking to this side again turned me down. Yeah.

Truly.

Yeah.

I mean that's it. That's how it is.

But I'm the only one, I'm the only person I know who's tried to get one that got turned down.

Yeah.

Because only me.

Yeah.

100% like they.

You are just.

You are power. You are creating electricity for their engine to work. When you're in a clicks and page views business, they need content to run ads against and content against. There's no scarcity. It's the same as Amazon. Selling books like you can sell as many as you want. So any of you can publish a book on how to stand on your head and drink water at the same time. And there's no gatekeeper on Amazon. You can publish it so that it's good and bad.

Okay.

So the reality of actually either hiring marketers or people to help you or becoming good at this, if someone wanted to become more skilled at this and you had to, off the top of your head, recommend a plan and a path to do that on things that everyone here could do that would be incredibly helpful. Things to read, things to watch. What would you recommend?

100%. So I was super fortunate in 2009 to leave a big boring corporate job and spend six months in a room like this with Seth Godin, who's one of the greatest marketers of all time. And I just absorbed everything he said, but nothing he told me was anything he hasn't said a thousand times in his books, in his blogs. If you want one book, I would start with Seth's most recent book called this is Marketing. It's an orange book and it's a greatest hits of Seth Godin, one of the greatest marketers of the last 30 years. And he tried to compile it all into one thing if you want to go deeper. He's got an online course called the Marketing Seminar. If you want to learn it, I highly suggest that book and then that marketing seminar. I think it's somewhere in the neighborhood of $500. But this like the XY adjectives. Like the thing I'll say is forget the fancy cutting edge tactics. Most people aren't doing the fundamentals. Most people don't know their positioning. And this book came out in the 80s. Most people don't know verb, your noun. And I would say get good at this. I mean only get good at this if you want to grow your business. Marketing is about understanding humans, not the product you sell. And how many would you know? Think about Apple. The Apple holiday ad. A kid goes home and he's like a floppy haired kid and he's home and it looks like he's ignoring his family and he's on his phone the whole time. And at the end of the commercial after it looks like he's ignoring his family for a whole minute, it turns out he was using his phone to create a mini documentary of his family Christmas. Hooks up his phone to the TV on Christmas morning, plays the whole thing, stitches it together with music and of course the parents and grandparents are crying. That compared to Verizon, who's selling gigabytes and coverage maps. That's your opportunity is to figure out the story that your business is telling. Because we all have roofs over our head in this room. We all have food on our table. We're not buying flower, you know, we're not buying what I think of Super Mario, the little guy and then the flower and then Big Mario, who's invincible and throws fireballs. Stop selling the flower, Start selling. Super Mario Lululemon sold the first million pairs of yoga pants to women who do yoga. And then they sold the next 10 million pairs of yoga pants to women who do brunch who think they are a kind of women who maybe does yoga but they don't know where the nearest yoga studio is. That's fine, it's not unethical. But it's the stories that we tell ourselves about ourselves.

Since me and you are good friends with the brilliant marketer Jay Abraham, I want to do a shout out to Jay. Absolutely. And of course that goofball Kevin Harrington who You actually are on Shark Tank with. And this video is going to go on ilove marketing.com.

What are your thoughts on marketing?

You obviously love marketing. You're a good marketer. You've built not only companies, but a brand and marketing is essential.

So what are your thoughts on marketing?

It's constantly changing in one way, it's constantly saying the same in the others. Today it's about transparency and today it's about over delivering and giving people as much as you can because that's the only thing that's going to separate you necessarily. It's always about positioning. It's always about what are you selling them, what's the, what's the, what's the movement you're selling them. And you know, I always feel like people do say that I may be brilliant or maybe smart. I feel like I know nothing when it comes to it because I'm constantly, you know, learn from guys and guys like you and Jay Abrahams of the world. And I, and I always look at something like I'm an idiot because I'm ready to learn more and more and more and I'm not too comfortable with myself and thinking I know what's going on, you know, and that's just where I look at marketing and branding. And I believe that that's, that's the only thing that, that that is going to position you to be successful is how you, how you market and brand it.

Yeah. You know, every time I, and we, you know, we've gone to dinner, I've seen you speak a couple times. You know, we've not hung out a ton, but we, you know, we've spent some time talking and I always hear you say things that I think are incredibly smart pieces of wisdom that I'd like to highlight. You know, I think going into anything, even if you're amazing and you've had great success with a beginner's mind, is just the smartest position to be in. Checking your ego, knowing you're never as good as your own pr. I mean, you know and understand those things. And you've seen many people that have literally gone to the top and tanked because they never built that level of confidence. So let's talk about how people can gain capabilities and for what, Whatever you're able, whatever access they could have to you, you're available to speak. I think you're a great speaker. So if anyone out there wants an amazing speaker, how does someone get a hold of you? Go to the Daymond John Academy.

Your books.

Yeah, There's Many touch points. Obviously you can go to dameandjohn.com where you can work with me either to consult or speak. You can go to the academy, you'll see or somebody looking for knowledge and understanding, you know, how to become a better entrepreneur and or meet other like minded people such as yourself. You know, you can see me up on Shark Tank fighting with those other four sharks every Friday night, 9pm I have two books out. Display of Power and the Brand Within. Where, you know, maybe you don't necessarily understand my, you know, my way of thinking and you know, before you listen to my thesis and understand where I come from because you can even either say this guy doesn't know what he's talking about or you resonate with where I've been. So there's many ways to. And of course Twitter the shark Damon. I'm on Twitter the Shark Damon.

What is the mission and purpose behind O2E brands and how do you grow these companies?

Yeah, so O2E brand stands for ordinary to exceptional. So we started by taking the ordinary business of junk removal and making it exceptional through customer experience. And then we realized, wow, I mean, what we had learned over 22 years with 1, 800 got junk. Imagine if we took that process and said, how do we do that to any home service brand? And so our real vision is to be the most trusted brands in home services, one exceptional experience at a time. And it's creating a recipe that we learned from 1-800-GET Junk and its journey into shack, shine and wow, one day painting and so on. So it's trying to pick industries when you say how do we grow them? Picking something like wow, one day painting. We are not looking for people that like painting, that want to paint, that want to build a painting business. We want people that see an opportunity to build an empire in a fragmented space. And so, wow, one day painting is one where we go in. A typical painting company would take two weeks to paint the whole interior of your house. We do it in a day. Wow. One day painting, it's just a numbers game. You put two people in this room, one person in that room, and you just get it done in a day with a single same quality but less disruption. And so we're trying to take spaces that are ordinary and saying, how do we make them exceptional?

Yeah, that's great. That's great. So obviously you need to do all this through people and teams and it was interesting. You talk about your first eight years until you hit a million. So what are the most important lessons that you've learned about finding, hiring, and nurturing the right people.

So 1994, five years into the business, I fired 11 people, which was my entire company. One bad apple spoils a whole bunch. I had nine bad apples. And I just said, you know what, guys? This isn't working. And it's not working because of me making the wrong choices. And I started by saying, I'm sorry, as your leader, I've let you down. I didn't give you the love and support you needed. I might not have found the right people. And I started again. And so the most valuable people lesson I learned was it's all about people finding the right people and then keeping them by treating them right. And so the way we look for people is the same way I think people look for friends. Is there a connection? You know, we didn't sit down and become friends by going, so, Joe, what do you like to do for fun? You know, and tell me about the last time you. Blah, blah, blah, whatever. It's like you just hit it off. You trust someone, you build a relationship, and you become friends.

Yeah.

And I think the same thing should happen with employees. Don't rush through an hour and interview someone and expect that you've made the right decision. You just. So finding the right people, part of it is taking the time. I mean, you'll get people here. I interviewed someone last week, two weeks ago, and I said, how many interviews are you on? And she said, 12. This is my 12th. And I'm like, wow, okay, you're halfway. And I was kidding because this was the last interview. But, like, 12 interviews is a long time. Yeah, but we're pretty darn sure after 12, and we'd rather do the work up front.

Is that normal?

It was a very senior position, and so maybe a little less normal, but for senior positions, yeah, maybe 10 to 13 interviews. And for someone working in the sales center, it might be two or three.

How many people directly report to you? Or, you know, I mean, that's. That's always a tough question because you interact with so many. I'm sure. Yeah. What's. What is the. Do you look at it as a hierarchy? How do you look at your structure here? From you starting with you as the leader.

Yeah. So as the leader, I have two direct reports.

I guess it is.

So Eric, who's our president and coo, while it's a direct report, it's also us, really, what we call two in the box. I'm the visionary, he's the implementer, and together, two heads are better Than one. And then my assistant Jen, who you've met. Right. So I mean those are my reports. So anytime. And I interface with everybody. I mean there's all sorts of stuff going on. I'm open door. There's no door on my office because I don't have an office. But it's really connecting with people. But the flow, the hierarchy, if you will, of decision making seems to have a flow. So Eric makes decisions and if he's got concerns or needs some feedback, he'll come to me and we'll talk about it. But if I start interfacing and making decisions as the CEO, with everyone in the business, all hell breaks loose.

Gotcha.

Yeah.

Before you schedule a meeting or a meeting as scheduled as you, what are the standards, the criteria? Are you a guy that does a lot of meetings, Are you sort of meeting avoidant? And I've heard everything under the sun. You know, our friend Cameron Herold wrote meetings suck. But the purpose of that is to most meetings suck because people do meetings in a crappy way. So I want to. And then there's Peter Drucker who would say you're either working or you're in meetings. And so there's different ways to think about it. So I wanted to get your perspective on.

I do think, you know, I believe in what Cameron says, that meetings suck, but they don't have to. If you have the right meeting set up and structure and really ensure. Do we need a meeting? So my criteria for meetings, and it's an O2E Brands thing, but purpose, outcome, agenda doesn't matter. If it's a 10 minute meeting, a three hour meeting, why are we meeting? What's the purpose? What do we want to get out of this? And then what's the agenda? How are we going to talk about things? And so if somebody sets up a meeting with me and doesn't have purpose, outcome, agenda, Jen says what is it? Otherwise we're not meeting. And she'll push back and say, do we really need this meeting? Does it really need to be half an hour? Could it be 10 minutes? Could it be combined with another meeting? So I try to be very back to back and efficient and then I practice Dan Sullivan's stuff even though I haven't sat through Dan Sullivan's work, even though I know him where Monday is my day out of the office, my buffer day to really kind of go through and catch up on things and focus on things outside of the office. Then I've got three focus days at work where I'm back to back in meetings. And then Friday is my free day where I try not to think business on most Fridays and try and focus on family or fitness or friends.

Well, let me ask you about that. So how long have you been doing that with Fridays and how consistent are you with it?

I've been doing it for probably 15 plus years. I'm consistent maybe 80% of the time. So I'd say I go through periods where it just gets really busy or something's kind of hit the fan and it's like I feel like I'm needed and it's more out of guilt than being really needed. And so I'll step in and I'll try and help or I'll make myself available. But I really work hard to keep those Fridays free so that I can keep myself healthy and keep myself mentally clear. Right. I think as entrepreneurs, we often go home and continue to think and work on things and sort of have some time to recharge the batteries. I think is incredibly important, at least for me.

Let me ask you something. And I think it is increasingly more difficult from all the people I've interviewed, all the entrepreneurs I'm constantly working with over the years, and especially we are more connected electronically than ever before in human history and more disconnected in terms of relationships and constant screen time and so many ways that people can reach you now. So you say I try to not think about work. And obviously try is because, I mean, I can completely resonate with that. I'm a guy that meditates, I do yoga, I work out, I do a lot of stuff. And the rumination about business and open loops for entrepreneurs is a very difficult, challenging things. So what are some of the ways that you have learned to disconnect and rejuvenate that you could describe that would be helpful for people watching?

It's easy, actually, when people hear this, they're like, wow, that is easy. When I go on vacation and I probably take eight weeks per year, sometimes in a month, chunk. And what I do is I get my assistant Jen to change my passcode on my email and all my social media so I can't access anything. So on my cell phone, I can't sit there and check email, I can't check Instagram, I can't do anything, what I call going dark and so dark from technology, and it works for me. So I will literally go away to Italy like I did this summer with the family, and I won't hear from anybody. And the only person that has sort of permission, if you will, to call Me for an emergency would be Jen. And I don't get called. You know, Like, I remember when this first happened. It's like, well, what if the office burns down? Call the fire department. What am I going to do from wherever I am?

Right.

And I get that people might not have been comfortable with it in the beginning, but what I love about it is it's a tool that we've spread into the organization. When people take vacation, we expect them to go dark. We expect them to get someone else to change their passcode so that they can't check in now. So let's say on weekends. So last Thursday, I sent an email to Jen and I said, I'm going dark. See you next weekend, next week. I mean, so I just shut off my own email and had the discipline to do it just for a weekend, but I didn't check in.

That's great.

And so I think that people have to give themselves permission to do that. And people might think, oh, it's nice to be king. You're the CEO. Great that you can do that. No, we want everyone in our company to do that. We give five weeks back paid vacation to all our employees. And we have for years. I mean, decades. We want people to use that time and be free from work and not feel like they've got to check in.

Yeah, well, and they're more productive that way, too.

100%.

See, people think if you keep them working, sleeping at the office, staying up late at night, all this sort of stuff that you're going to squeeze more work out of does not work. Yeah. My friend Kathy Colby has this great language. She says that time to quit working is when working is no longer working. And if you're working nonstop, you get to a point where you just can't. It's like reading a book, and you read a page and you're at the end of the page and you're like, I didn't comprehend any of it. So you start reading it again as if that's gonna. It's like, you just gotta give your brain.

And Cameron and I used to say years ago, in the early days, like, work is our hobby. We love it so much, we don't have to stop. Well, you know what? I love skiing, but I can't ski all day every day or I'd blow my legs and knees out. I mean, you need to take a break no matter what your hobby is, and recharge, and your family needs you and your friends need you, and, you know, it's important.

Yeah, that's Great. That's great. So speaking of Cameron. So Cameron is a good friend. We're actually having dinner at his house tonight. And he's been a genius network member for many years. I've seen him write a lot of books through the time I've had the relationship. So he did a lot of stuff in this company. And you also ended up, I believe, firing him, right?

Yeah.

Yeah, that's true.

So let's talk about Cameron. I mean, what could you say about that? Dude?

Yeah.

So love him. I was his best man in his wedding. So hard to take someone when you were the best man in his wedding and then going, hey, buddy, this isn't working out so well, and having to fire one of your best buds. So, you know, and Cameron would tell you, I'm sure he has, and he would say it if he was here with us.

Oh, he publicly says that when he gives speeches.

So. Yeah. But I mean, he would even say this. He would say it was the right thing for both of us.

Yeah.

Tough decision. Right call. And so what was happening is Cameron and I are both a little add fire ready, aim types. And as the company got beyond 75 million, close to 100 million, we started to make decisions just too quickly, without thinking. And the company wasn't a little speedboat that could turn on a dime. It was becoming a little ship. And he helped us go from 2 million to 106 million. And we were making some decisions that needed more rigor. And having two leaders who are two add fire ready AIM types at the top isn't sustainable. And so had to make the change. It was super tough. Failed with the next coo, and then third time around, found Eric Church, who actually, ironically, were the three people on the planet that told me about Eric. One of them was Cameron. Yeah.

Yeah. Which is great.

It's great. And so, you know, I mean, kudos to Cameron for having peace with it in the end. Like, it was hard at the time and it was a strain on her friendship, but, you know, we're tight now. We'd do anything for each other. And it was one of those. We're so grateful to have had those seven years together to get through the pain and then come back to, you know, hanging out at the genius Network. You know, he was the one that.

Said, you got to do this.

You gotta go.

Yeah.

No, he's great. He's great.

Yeah.

And there's so much, you know, one question, you know, Cameron wrote a book on it called Fruity Free pr and you guys did a lot to Leverage PR in your growth. So how did you do that?

How did we get free press? Yeah, it was picking up the phone and telling stories. So earlier you and I talked how? I would call up the press and I'd say, I've got a great story idea for you, and sell on enthusiasm and try and give them a clear pitch because they're busy. They didn't have time to listen to pitches, and you'd lose them in 20 seconds if they didn't like the pitch. I'd say, what's missing? Why isn't it a great story? What would make it a great story? And I'd always get the answers that would help me on the second call, third call, fourth call. And it was amazing because journalists all seem to think the same. I mean, stories. You look at anything that's in the press right now, you can say it fits a formula of rags to riches, hero's journey, someone crashing and burning. Whatever the story arc is, there's simple formulas there. And when you understand them and you realize you've got a compelling story and you frame it in the right way. Bingo. Free press. And so too many companies, I think, get out there and put their stuff out to the world, but it's not a story or it's not framed in the right way.

Yeah, it's great. I mean, just asking those questions to find that out. I mean, that would work with almost anyone where you're not landing. You know, I mean, you could even ask the client, why didn't you buy what was missing? What would you need to have heard?

100%.

Yeah.

And people don't. I think people. I don't know why they do this, but maybe it's ego where you get caught up and you go, oh, the person said, no, they didn't like my story. Well, it might not fit with them, but use it as an opportunity. Don't hang up. Find out what's missing. They'll tell you.

Yeah, that's awesome. What are the struggles of starting three new brands?

Yeah, you know, I think, like, kids, you know, I've got three young kids, and, you know, they're always competing for time, and everyone needs mom and dad and all that sort of stuff. And I think it's a similar thing with brands. You know, people will say, what's your favorite brand? I can only tie to the analogy for those that have kids, that it's like, kids, you don't have favorites. I mean, there's certain days, certain times where you're like, you are not my favorite, but you Know, it's one of those things where trying to bob and weave between them can be a challenge because depending on the stage of growth they're at, they need different things. So I think that's the hardest part is just figuring out, how do you give enough time to the brands when they need you and so on.

Well, you know, because there's different types of entrepreneurs that kind of have their way of doing things. Like, for instance, I've interviewed Richard Branson, God, probably more than anyone. I mean, I've spent, you know, six weeks of my life on Necker island and, you know, got hours and hours of video, and we've only put out a couple of, you know, produced things, you know, and it's been a while. But I've got, you know, he's a guy that's tried to start a bazillion things and license a virgin brand. A lot of them don't work, you know, and he has his core ones that do. And then there's other people that will say, stick to this thing and don't spread yourself too thin. And some people may look at what you're doing and argue and say, well, you know, you can't ultimately decide, so you're trying to do, you know, four different brands at the same time or whatever. So what is it inside you? What are you hoping to achieve and wanting to achieve? I mean, and not hoping, because you are doing it. I mean, it's not like something you're not doing. You're doing it. Why three different brands versus five versus one?

I mean, it partially started by accident where I was getting my house painted. And the first two or three people that come in, they reeked of cigarette smoke. They were late. They just. No level of professionalism. And they're coming in, giving me a quote on my paint job. And it was sort of what I expected. But the third guy came in, uniformed, shiny van, clean cut. He said, you know, our prices are the same, the quality is the same. I've done this for 22 years. But what's different is I'll get your house done in a day. I didn't even think you could do that. I didn't think it was possible. And I come home at the end of the day, 6:30pm Floor, ceilings, molding, trim, everything was immaculate. Wow. I was like, wow, this is cool. Wow. Wow. One day painting, right? That's how I felt. Same comment you just made. And the company's, wow, one day painting. And so it was partially out of the right place at the right Time it was being wow, seeing another opportunity. But why I think it's progressed on to other brands is just. It fits for us because it's home services. And as long as it's a home service that we can make exceptional on a similar platform. I've gotten pitched on things like snow removal. Well, snow. You don't have snow in every single market we're in. And it's seasonal. And yes, it's a home service, but it doesn't really fit in the same way. So we're cautious on starting new brands. We're focused on the brands we've got. But really what motivates us to keep doing it is more franchise owners living the dream.

When you said wow. When I said wow, that totally. This got my brain thinking of going. Yeah. So you're like a guy that's just looking for the wow. And if you can package your formula and your process around wow and scale that, then that's what lights you up.

That's it.

Yeah. Which is pretty awesome. Why not sell equity or raise money? Because you talked about staying private versus going public. Why?

I think it's a couple reasons. It's forced me to. Slower and steady wins the race kind of deal. I mean, zero to a million, eight years, that's slow. If I gave away equity, I might have had others tell me where they thought the business should go and what the direction was. So I like owning the vision. I don't need to own anything else. But that vision, that North Star of where we're going has been important to me. And I just. I've heard too many stories of people that have sold their business or pieces of. And they thought that taking chips off the table would bring some happiness. They thought that having some equity to help them grow to that next level, it often doesn't pan out. And I think, you know, I like the fact that it forces us to grow at a steadier pace and to do things the way we want to do it.

I mean, I can't. I imagine you've had, like, people come here and dangle large sums of money in front of you. You to buy the company and stuff at times or no.

Yeah.

I mean, I talk about it one chapter in the book where I'm on Sonora Lodge, a big fishing resort up in British Columbia, and it's one of the most beautiful places on the planet. It feels like Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous and Waste Management. Two of their execs got me out on a boat.

Oh, that's right.

Wined and dined me and brought me up there and we had a great time. But then I'm out in the middle way from shore. Can't see shore in a fishing boat catching salmon with two garbage execs. Think maybe Sopranos, right? And they're like, yeah, we want to buy your company. And I'm like, do I have a choice in this is kind of what's going in my mind. And they said, you know, we're talking 75 to 100 million bucks at a time when my company was so tiny. But I said to them, I go, honestly, guys, like, thank you, but I'm not done building this. I'm just getting started and I don't know what I'd do with the money. And I said, if you guys gave me a billion dollars, something just ridiculous, I still wouldn't sell because I really love what I'm doing and the cause I'm after of growing entrepreneurs and building brands. And I don't want someone else to take my happiness away that I get from growing this. So never sold. Never sold a chunk of it. And just believe that it's too much fun and too big of an opportunity to not see through.

So what's the best piece of business advice you've ever received and how did it change your business path and your direction?

I think it was. Well, I received a couple of them. The first one was somebody said, don't spend all your money, kid, because it's really, really hard to make money and it's 10 times harder to keep it. I think that was one of them. And I think the other one was it's all about the numbers. There's only two ways to do business. Increase sales or decrease cost. That's it. And don't do anything because it's an ego play. Increase sales or decrease cost. That's it. And those things probably have been the ones and everybody else knows all the other ones. Of course, do what you love. Of course, do your research and everything else. But the room knows that already.

So FUBU has. It's had 6 billion in global sales. What are the key elements, secrets and requirements of building like a six billion dollar brand that people here can utilize?

Well, in the days that we built it, I think that there are a couple of things. First of all, you know, in business, it's purely about distribution. I think that you can have the greatest idea in company or whatever the case is, but you don't have a way to distribute it. It's a pipeline, it's a challenge. I think that to understand Then don't fall in love with your product where you, you think that you're creating something new. Because we will never create anything new. It will only be a new position or a new angle on it, a new price. You know, I always say Twitter was, as I shared with you before, it was a note on a pigeon's leg a million years ago. And I didn't put three sleeves on a T shirt. I just created a movement around it. So it's always a different positioning. And I think those are the ways. And then after you get to a certain level where you have brand equity and I think is creating a large amount of really amazing strategic partners. You know, licensing, whether it's a territory or licensing a different angle of your product is important. I'm not going to understand what they necessarily want in Japan, even though they want Fubu in Japan. It's a different culture. As well as I can do my men's business, but you and I were two guys. If you wear a 32 and I wear 32, there's two size 32, there's 32 long, 32 short. If I sell a pair of seven or a pair of eight jeans to a female, there's 17 sizes because the thighs are too big, the butt's too big, gaps over here. So I would license that business to an expert in that area because I don't have a lifetime to learn the ladies business as well. So I think that strategic partners are very valuable.

All right, so my name is Nick Manchin. I'm originally from the island of Barbados. My family's been there for 300 years. They came as Welsh pirates in the 1600s. So as I was growing up, my dad kept asking me what I wanted to be. I kept telling him I wanted to be a pirate. So the older I got, the funnier I thought it was. You can imagine, the older I got, the less funny he thought it was. Until one day he came up to me and said, hey, Nick, I figured out what you're going to be. I said, what's that, dad? He said, you're going to be a lawyer. That way you can still pillage. That's my only bad lawyer joke of the day. But I really am from Barbados. I started playing guitar at 6, started songwriting at 16, because I liked girls and they liked songs. And I put out my first record at 18, of which there are still 800 copies under my parents bed. Why? Because all the things I'm going to teach you today, I knew nothing about. Now that I know all these things I want those records to stay there until that place burns to the ground someday. So I did all this stuff. I went up to the University of Florida at 18 years old. Go Gators. And I figured out there's 50,000 students there and they had a thing called a student activities fee. Every student put a little bit of money in this big, this fund, which was a big fund. They let a bunch of 20 year old kids run it. So I figured I should get involved. So I got involved and I helped bring in lots of talent. I brought in Bill Cosby, President Bush, Don Shula, Bobby Knight, the cast of the Real World, New Orleans. And I figured out that these people were really just like you or me. I'd been producing records. I had been working with, I still work with a drummer from Tom Petting, the Heartbreaker. I was working with the band Sister Hazel. I was making music videos. And I realized that really all these people had certain things in common. So I did what any person would do. I went to law school. And so why did I go to law school? Two reasons. My brother went to med school, so I had to do something. And secondarily I wanted to be the president of a record label. I knew lots of presidents of major corporations were lawyers. So I went to law school, continued doing media creation and stuff. And then I got out of law school. And so I got married after my first semester of law school, had my first son a week after I took the bar exam. So life in fast forward has always been kind of my forte. So I got out of law school and this whole thing called Napster happened while I was there. I don't know if you caught on that. So that whole business kind of didn't exist when I got out. And so my business partner Jack's like, well, hey Nick, I know what you should do, but you're not going to like it. I said, what's that? He said, you should practice law. Because I went to law school. The first day in law school, they asked what kind of law you're going to practice. I said, I'm never going to practice day of law in my life. And so they thought that was good because they do the look to your left, look to your right thing. They're not going to be there. They thought it was going to be me, but it wasn't. So I got the last laugh there. So out of law school he says, hey, we can position you as one of the top experts in the entire world as an entertainment lawyer. Does that interest you? I'm like, yeah, it does. He goes, well, what you probably don't realize is you have two unique skill sets. Media creation. I'd made music videos, I'd made magazine ads. I had just done a bunch of media creation. And you understand celebrity buzz building and PR because of the people you've worked with. Okay, cool. What you may not realize about me, and this is him talking to me now, he said, nick, what I have a specialty in is personal branding and direct marketing. He had marketed and sold over a billion dollars worth of products and services with those two skill sets. So if we put the four of those together, personal branding, direct marketing, media buzz building, and PR and media creation, we can position you as one of the top entertainment lawyers in the country. So I bid. So we did it. Within a year of me practicing law full time, I was billing at over $1,000 an hour. And I'm in Orlando. Not the place matters that much. But most of those deals go down to LA or New York. So I don't tell you that to brag. I tell you that to tell you that it worked. So I did want any 20 something year old kid who's billing $1,000 an hour would do. I went to Jack and said, this is awesome, but I don't want to do it anymore. He said, great, what do you want to do? So I want to travel the world and teach people how to do what we did because we just created a freedom formula. Now if anyone follows our formula, they can work less, make more, they can work more, make more, they can have more of an impact. That's what they can do. So he said, that's a great idea, Nick, but you have one big problem. So what's that? He said, you're your only testimonial. Duly noted. So he said, you should write a book. So I said, like an ebook. And he's like, well, everyone's doing ebooks. But no, you'll never get the same type of credibility you'll get from an actual physical hard copy book. So I bit again. We wrote a book called Celebrity Branding youg. It took about six months to write it. I did what I call drive by writing. It's like the computer's open. I kind of walk by and do a little bit of that because I don't sit down for very long, if you haven't noticed. So we wrote the book Celebrity Branding youg and we took the book and we were getting ready to launch the book. And I did what I thought he had done on his last book because he had a three big book deal with McGraw Hill. Him, the publicist. Everyone brought in this guy. His only job was to make the book a best seller. So I tried to study what he was doing. He wouldn't tell me anything. And I tried to replicate it for our book. I also emailed everyone I'd ever met and said, practically, I will fly to your house and wash your dog if you will buy my book. So we launched the book. Also my son. It was Halloween Day 2008. My son was in a pirate costume. Jokes later, and I filmed the video and it said, r mateys, buy my daddy's book. Shameless. I know, but it worked. The day the book came out, we had seven best seller lists. And my life's never been the same since. I travel around the country and now the world. I gave away 1,000 books is how I made my first seven figures. I gave away 1,000 books. That's how I made my first 7 figures. So you don't make money by selling a book. You make money by having a book. Big important point. So now I do that for over 2,200 clients all around the world. And the thing that I want to break down for you today is that's my story. Why I told you my story is because of one thing. Branding is simply storytelling. Most people will try to confuse you about what it is. It's simply storytelling. Tell your story and that's building your brand. And ultimately, you want other people telling your story for you. So you have to figure out how to tell that story in a way that's effective, that they will want to pass it along to. So we'll do a little exercise here. Try to fill in the blank for me. Tastes great. Less melts in your mouth, not in your. Got. Not milk, but. Or got. I messed that one up. Got. Not beer, but milk. Yeah, right. That's it. So how do you know all these things? Repetition. Right? So the reason why you know all these things, because brands have spent billions and billions and billions of dollars just cramming this stuff in your head. I also know you now watch entirely too much television. But brands spend billions of dollars putting this in your head. So how many of you here have about a billion dollars to spend on your branding? Well, damn it, I usually get at least one. But here's what you gotta do. So the only way to combat that truly, is personal branding. Because it's the one thing that you have that no one else has and will never have. So you can either spend money trying to create associations with nameless faceless objects and words, or you can make people connect with you personally. And so that's what we specialize in. That's what we teach people how to do. So what you have to do, you have to tell your story so that people understand who you are and where you came from. You kind of have this life, and you've got where you start and where you end. And we have this whole journey in between. And things happen to us, good things, bad things. And most of us tend to want to close the door on the bad things, right. And just forget about them. Well, all those things make you uniquely positioned to be the only person in the world to help your prospect the way you can because of what you've been through. So don't forget those things. That's part of telling your story. Okay? Now, storytelling is really interesting. There's the left brain and the right brain, right? So the left brain is the analytical side. The right brain is known as the creative side. If I asked you which side of the brain do you think stories appeal to? Which one would you say? The right side, the creative side. It's actually wrong. That's why I asked. So the left side of the brain is actually what storage appeal to because it helps you make sense of things you otherwise wouldn't understand. So it takes a bunch of facts and puts them together into something that you want to believe in, and it makes sense out of it in the analytical side of your brain. So think about, would you rather watch Braveheart or read a book on the history of Scotland? Braveheart, right? Want to watch Mel Gibson kick some ass? So that will give you. That's how that works. Now, every time you tell a story that people connect with, there's a chemical in your brain called oxytocin that's released. That is not what Rush Limbaugh got in trouble for. That's OxyContin. This is oxytocin. This is a chemical you have in your brain. When you give someone a hug, when you have sex, this is released. You can actually get the same effect from telling a story. Also, when this chemical is released, it builds trust. So if you tell a great story, you build trust. Now, let's talk about how to really use this to your advantage. Now, all these things I'm telling you can be used for good or for evil. I ask that you only use them for good. So, anyone know what Dunbar's Rule is? I learned it from reading Peter D. Manus book Abundance. Basically, you can have 100 relationships with. You can only ever have really 100 relationships at one time been researched. I didn't do the research, but they tell me it's true. So think about it. If someone watches Oprah every day, Oprah takes over one of those 100 spots. So if you watch Oprah every day, you take over one of those 100 spots. I don't think. I think your brain can definitely distinguish between your mother and OPRAH Being at 1 in 100 or whatever. But the whole point is you create relationships and Oprah is creating a relationship through media. So let's talk about the effect of media on storytelling and your brand. So you can create many media formats that are one to many, but feel like one to one. Well written newsletters, CDs, DVDs, Internet videos, emails to your list. Those feel like one to one communications, but they're one to many. If you show up in your client's mailbox or inbox regularly, you will get done. Bars rule effect media effect on your clients and prospects. You'll actually become their friend in the business. And if you have a friend in the business, how many people do you call to get a quote? One you call your friend in the business. So it makes price irrelevant, it makes competition irrelevant. All based on building your personal brand. But you cannot do that unless you tell your story. So in closing, what I want you to understand is that building your brand is nothing more than telling your story effectively. Tell your story effectively through media. Media is simply a medium for telling your story. And when you do it effectively and you connect with people on a one to one level using one to many media formats, you can connect with lots of people, you can create relationships. The trust factor will go up. They'll get oxytocin, their brains. They will actually feel like they are a part of your story if you let them in on it. And so they will ultimately feel like if they went to your competitors, they would be tearing down what they've helped to build. So go out and tell your story. That's how you build your brand. Thank you.

Why should someone have a personal brand site? Why does it even matter?

Right. So firstly, there's different classes of people for who it matters. And you know, for there are some people, especially right now, like coaching, consulting expert. Industry is huge and there's a lot of people stepping into building careers around what they're selling is their personal skill sets more than a specific product or service or that service is attached to their personal skill set. So for those people, obviously it matters because their name.com is like the center of your Online universe, Right. Even if somebody sees a Facebook post or they see an ad or they just hear about somebody from speaking on stage, they're googling oftentimes that person and the first thing that comes up is for most people, usually quite embarrassing. And that even goes for major influencers. Whether somebody's like a coach, consultant, doing something with their personal brand starting out, or their major influencers. Like a lot of the people you listed and you and like many others who we've worked with, you know, when we first look at the site, it's just. It's not representing who you are in person, and it's not doing what it needs to for your business. So for a lot of people, you have like, your whole team has o Polish email addresses, right? When somebody Googles Genius Network, your personal site comes up. And it's the same for most people, whether they're independent, Right. Coaches, consultants, authors, speakers. Or if you have a business that isn't directly sourced from or connected to your personal brand, but it's its own brand, very oftentimes it's still connected to a personal brand or personal reputation. And just like personal reputation, damage will harm the brand itself. Like, for example, I'm looking at your bookshelf. There's Branson books.

I don't know why there's Branson books on this.

So if Branson started doing things that were really damaging to his personal brand, it would affect people doing business with Virgin companies.

I'm surprised at all things he's done that that has not happened too much.

Well, he's polarizing. He's authentic. So people that want to do business with Virgin are people that like how Virgin and how he shows up in the marketplace. There are certain people who are. Just because it's polarizing, they're like, hell, no, I don't support that. And he doesn't want those people, which I think is also really important in a personal brand, is to determine it's authentic. It's what you stand for and who you are for you. You'll talk about addiction quite a bit in Genius Network.

Yes.

And for people that are turned off by that or just like, listen, I want nothing to do with that conversation. It's like, cool. You don't have to be a part of this. But for most people, they're like, cool. Either they'll. Maybe some people tolerate it, but I think most people actually love that as part of the conversation, love that it's open and authentic. So we're getting more into, like, the tips here, but I think it's important to be authentically expressed in a personal brand and not really fear that, oh, this is going to hurt my business, because then you're going to have a neurosis no matter what. This is who I am versus this is who my business is, and you have to hide. Ideally, this is something that gets you more congruent with your business message and your personal message. So I think it's whether somebody has a business around their personal name or if somebody has a business that has nothing to do with they are at that time, but there's a brand that they have out in the marketplace, who they are personally as a CEO and founder will still impact either positively or negatively. And you get to choose that the success of the business and the reputation of the business.

Well, I mean, I think there's a couple things based on what you said that are important. If you try to portray yourself as someone that you're not in and it's easily found out that you're not that way. Don't sit and try to build a whole business about pontificating positive messages if you're really an asshole behind the scenes. Like an example, Larry Winget, who's a buddy of mine, he's very polarizing. And he watched. There's a comedian. Some people that are younger may not know the comedian, but Dennis Miller, who he was watching on TV years ago, and he was a, you know, Larry Wingate was this professional speaker wearing the suits, doing the whole thing. And he heard, you know, Dennis Miller say, I'm not very endearing. And for some reason, that just hit him that, you know, I'm not very endearing either. You know, I'm not an endearing person. And so he created like, he's like, I'm just going to be me. Started wearing these crazy clothes, shaved his head, earrings, you know, big bracelets, all this, you know, crazy boots. I mean, if you've never seen Larry Winget, he's a character. You know, you can watch one of my interviews with him on video. I do a whole tour through his boot closet, which is funny, but he just, like, he's this really hardcore. And it's very congruent with who he is. But a lot of people that they. I've even heard people say this, you know, this is what I want to portray. This is who I am, you know, on stage in my brand. But that's not who I am as a person. I'm like, well, why the hell would you even do that? That just seems like a pain in the ass.

Yeah, the incongruency becomes painful.

Yeah, it's like trying to remember lies, you know, it's like trying to pretend to be someone that you're not. And so if you wanted to create characters and all that, or some people are like, well, what if my real me is like a shy, introverted, scared person? But I want to. Well, first off, there's ways to build your Persona around that that can become very approachable by very many people. I think the reason a lot of people resonate with me in the field of addiction and recovery is I'm so open about talking about all of my struggles, talking about all the shit that, you know, has happened in my life. And a lot of people, I think, find it, you know, find me real. And I really hope that I come across that way and there is a time and a place for it. You know, most people, not all, but most people have drank beer. Most people at some point in their life have gone to church, but most people don't drink beer in church. So, you know, there's a time and place on how you portray yourself. But at the end of the day, whatever you build your business and your brand around, I really should be around you, who you really are. David Ogilvy, who's one of the greatest advertising minds in history, he wrote a book years ago called Ogilvy on Advertising. What he said is that brand is the personality of your product or service. I've always liked that sort of definition because there's a lot of people that talk about brand, and I always say you can't deposit name recognition. A small service business is an example, or a small company that doesn't have the ad budget of an Apple Computers or a Coca Cola or a McDonald's. They're not going to build a global brand just by having logos.

That's why it's so vital. It's to firstly fuse it with the direct response elements and to do what works. And then also for brand to be not just something that you invent and create. It's not just a blank canvas project. It's more of a what's the essence of your brand? Or if you're a personal brand, what's the essence of your personality? Like, who are you? And what are the most important parts of that essence to display and express out to the world that will actually resonate with people that want to do business with you?

Yeah, gotcha. Good. That's great. So, all right, let me go see some questions here. What advice do you have for entrepreneurs who have built great brands Products, services companies and so on, but who don't put intention into building their personal brands.

Yep. So this has been such a interesting conversation lately with some really successful entrepreneurs who've built these really big brands and they're like, wow, what's next for me? Because eventually they exit or they sell. And as entrepreneurs there's still something next that they want to do. And in many ways their personal brand is that thing that they build, that's what they're known for. But there's an evolved expression to that.

Yeah, I got you said something real important. Sorry to interrupt. Although that's part of my brand. I just interrupt people and I think even the website you're building for me, which is we interrupt as people scroll through. Kidding. That doesn't happen. Although I'm thinking that could be a strategy here. You said if they're entrepreneurs, if they sell, they usually want to do something else. Well, here's a real easy way to find out if you're not an entrepreneur, if you ever sell your company or you have this idea of retiring, you're just not an entrepreneur. None of them want. No true achievement minded entrepreneur ever wants to stop. And people think it's about the money. Money, of course is important because that's how you actually create a team and that's how you change the world and that's how you do what you need to do. It's the fuel that drives the engine. But at the same time, the entrepreneur is always going, so what's that have to do with building a brand? Well, you're always growing.

So anyway, right. I believe entrepreneurs at heart most of the time are artists or they're creators in some way. And their external, their businesses are expressions of whatever it is that they're creating. And usually within a few years, oftentimes whatever they created, they'll want to move on to that. The next thing you know, you talk about all the time being inspired by new projects. What allows somebody in the marketplace to start new projects faster is if you have a really great personal reputation, personal list outside of what is built just for that specific company. Because if that company sells the list, the brand, the audience, all of that goes. And now you're an entrepreneur who's, you've got that exit under your belt, but you're kind of starting from scratch as well as far as your public reputation goes. Now there's people who know you for what you've done, but now you've got to build that from scratch. So, perfect example, somebody who we're supporting with his Journey right now. So Michael Perella with I Love kickboxing and his other fitness businesses, you know, huge success in that industry. And that's been a chapter. And he'll continue to serve that industry. And there's the question for him of, okay, like, what is next? How do I serve in a bigger way as whether it's this chapter comes to a close or whether it's like, I'm taking all my skills from this and want to go into the next thing. And for him, as it is for many other entrepreneurs, it's not like, hey, I want to build another brand and another company. It's I want to use my personal skills, wisdom, all the stuff that I've gathered and garnered from all of these experiences to impact other companies or impact the world. Write a book with Tucker, Max with Book in a Box. So many of his clients are people who've built successful companies and now saying, hey, I want to take all my experiences and publish a book around it. So what I've seen many entrepreneurs. Cameron Herald is a really great example of this as well. He walked a particular career path so he could build a few companies playing an executive role to nine figures so that he could coach entrepreneurs afterwards. That was actually his dream. He just wanted to build the experience and the reputation publicly. So he was really smart at doing this because he built his personal brand the whole way. Many entrepreneurs, you know, Michael included, and many others. There's another Mike that I talked to recently who, as a company called CEO Warrior, also sold and exited from a business and now is like, hey, how do I position my personal brand alongside this other training company that I'm doing? So the advice is start doing this sooner rather than later, because at some point you're going to want to do it for you. It was Piranha marketing, all the different expressions of that, and then Genius Network and other brands and projects and all these things you've been involved with. At the center of that is Joe Polish. And if all of those brands went away, you'd be like, well, I'm still Joe Polish and I've still got my personal reputation with the world and the emails that go out go out for me. And everybody knows who Joe Polish is. And if every one of your brands and companies all of a sudden just got destroyed for whatever reason, you had to start from fresh. You still have your personal brand reputation list, audience. So I think it's whether you're focused on building a business that's right now in a consultative or kind of like a speaker, author, whatever, Fashion around your personal brand or not, or you're just building a separate company, start that process sooner than later, even if it's baby steps. And then the additional benefit of that, too, is you end up, if you have a great personal brand presence, you end up getting speaking engagements, more media and pr. Because most media and people who run podcasts and all these people, they want to talk about. They want to talk to the person. Right. They want to interview the person. They want to write the story about the person and their entrepreneurial story more than they want to write about a company or a brand. So it opens you up for even greater media exposure for whatever external brands you're building, if you're building a really solid personal brand and sharing your story with the world.

Right, right. Yeah. And you know the interesting thing, too, because you take Genius Network, which is one of my main things, and so much of my life goes through Genius Network, the organization, but also the activity of genius networking and being a Genius Network networker and all the different ways that I talk about it. And I've, you know, I've never wanted Genius Network to be known for Joe Polish. I wanted it to be known for the people that are in Genius Network. And I think it has that reputation. Although, you know, currently I'm the one that, you know, runs it.

You're. You're a catalyst for it.

Correct.

You're not Genius Network, and Genius Network isn't you, but you're a catalyst for growing Genius Network, and then Genius Network then supports your personal reputation and connections as well.

Yeah, exactly. So, no, it's a good point. So what are some key questions people should be asking when creating their personal brand sites? Meaning how should they. Because I'm sitting here again, going back to, if someone never has an opportunity beyond hearing us right now to think about this, how would they feel equipped to know what to do?

Right. So I think there's three lenses that we look through, and I have a cat on my shirt here. That helps.

Yes, you do.

Remind of this.

That is a cat.

So the three lenses are purpose, purr, ception, and pursenality. So purpose, perception, personality.

What sort of drugs were you on when you first gave up with that sort of analogy?

I just. I love cats. I give this presentation. When I give a presentation like this on stage, I tell people that three things about me. One of them is I like cats and poetry. And I end up doing spoken word performance at the end of it. But I use all these cat puns throughout because it's fun. It helps people Remember? And for me, it's part of my little personal essence. People who know me well know that I like cats. So purpose, perception, personality, right? There's other ways to say that, but this is easy to remember. That's great. So the purpose piece of that is just asking what? And asking this for the site as a whole and asking for each section and each page of the site, what is the purpose, primary purpose of this site and the secondary purpose of this site? Like what do I want somebody to do? Oftentimes people start design without ever answering that question for themselves. And then people waste tens of thousands of dollars trying to create a website that doesn't achieve a particular purpose. So asking that first, and usually for most people it's I want to build my list. And whether it's I want to drive people into a particular program and drive applications, or it's I want more speaking gigs, right? I want more media exposure. But asking those questions and then building your entire site around that as a purpose because it'll tell you where to put what buttons, what navigation you should have, how the homepage scrolls a lot of the copy that you should have if you just ask the purpose. And part of that purpose question is like for who? Right? Who's going on the site and what do I want them to do? Is what is the purpose for the site? So 2 is perception and perception is this is the fun balance of what do you want people to experience you as? And it's not being inauthentic because the third is actually personality, which is being authentically yourself, but it is that how you're perceived matters and you get to intentionally control that perception in a way that's authentic to you. But you know, Neil Patel has this really great article. It's like how spending $162,000 on clothes made me $692,000 or something. Something like that. And he did nothing else different. He started going to his sales meetings, his high level B2B sales meetings, did nothing else different but started wearing super high end clothes. And his conversions increased and his overall just top line sales increased and just same presentation, same personality, same everything.

Interesting.

So the difference was how are people experiencing and perceiving him? And it wasn't like those clothes were any more or less authentic to him than the clothes that he was wearing before, but people were experiencing him differently. So it's the same online. I look at your website is a representation in many ways. It should be an expression of who you are in person.

This is very interesting what you said too. Because there's ways that how people try to portray, be it class or wealth or peacocking, there's a million different ways that you can categorize this. But we have a genius network member who's been in the group for a few years named Deving and he is an Indian guy and he's a financial advisor, he's a wealth advisor and he owns a bunch of franchises for different investments that he has. And I think he has a Ferrari, a Bentley and I think a Rolls Royce. And he buys these cars, parks them to where, you know, his office is, where he has all these other advisors. And once he started doing that, all of these other people started doing business with him and working with him. That did not. And he's actually explained to me how by buying these cars, it just has made him more money than what it even cost him to buy these cars. And the way he's positioning it now, what I get afraid of when I say stuff like that is people are under the belief that oh, if they go and buy something expensive, especially if they're not in a position to do that, that that somehow is going to translate to money, which in many cases it doesn't at all. Unless you actually are strategic about how you do it.

Right. It should be intentional, it should be congruent to where you're actually at. But I think the reason I share this so often is most of the time people's sites are incongruent to where they're at in just an underselling and negative way. Like for most people, again including a lot of the influencers we mentioned, we know who they are. And if you go to their sites you're like, this is, this is a joke, some seventh grader like threw up a WordPress template with some broken links and this is this person's website who's supposedly this major influencer. And it does damage first time experiences and first time perceptions. And if that's the case, imagine for somebody who's not, you know, who's not a best selling author but who is selling, you know, maybe it's $20,000 consulting packages or who is saying, hey, I'm a really great speaker and I want to speak in front of your corporate audience and they're selling $10,000 speeches, which there's many great speakers out there who are really wonderful speakers who, if you go to their website, it does not remotely represent the level of professionalism or brand and all of that. They are. So that's where perception comes in, right? It's if I'm booking speakers and I'm going on there and the person has a total joke of a website and I don't even know where to click to book the person. Right? And I can't see testimonials of their speaking and I can't download their media kit and all these things aren't there and they're presenting themselves as a speaker, I will make the assumption that they're probably not a professional. And if I go on the site and I see a beautiful speaking reel and I see some great photos of them speaking, and I see their bio that I would put on my event site, and I see some testimonials of similar companies like mine who have hired that person to speak. And then I see an application that says, you know, like some details about my event to get in touch with the speaker's assistant. Now I'm like, it could be the same exact quality of speaker, but that perception, what that, that site is now creating a perception of professionalism and something high end that I'd want to pay money for.

Right? Yeah.

Love it.

Okay, and so next is personality, right?

So personality just really being, being authentic. We talked about this quite a bit in our portfolio. Specifically, I like playing around with this. If you look at jopolis.com, frankkern.com, yannicksilver.com, they all follow virtually the same formula. And we can go into that formula a bit so that people could, as they're building their own sites, copy that formula for themselves. But it's important if you copy a formula which is just the structure of what goes where, when, which is guided by purpose, but also guided by just the structure that usually just works for most sites that somebody isn't copying that formula while also trying to copy the design elements. Because Yonec's site is a bunch of colorful doodles and literally the blog is like a journal and is very yonik. Frank's site looks like a direct response ad and it's black and white with a little bit of like red and gold throughout. It's very frank and it's very much like, it's more of like Ogilvy style, which is representative of who he is, but follows the same formula. And then if we look at your site, it's more like walking around the Genius Network office where it has an air of professionalism but also like fun and artsy and has some of the gaping void style imagery on there and uses a lot of like great photography of both like you and the events. So Each of them follows the same structure, but each of them expresses the personality really differently. So for somebody building their own site, or let's say, you know, you're working with an agency or a freelancer, giving more of, hey, this is my essence. This is the stuff that's really fun for me. This is the stuff that's important to me. In addition to these are the goals that I want to achieve with my site will allow that site to be a much more authentic expression of who they are. And the impact on the audience is that people will be more likely to experience them through that site and therefore more likely to buy or subscribe because it's not generic, it's not a copycat. It's that person and their expression online.

Gotcha.

Gotcha.

No, so that's good. So purpose, perception, personality.

Yes.

Let's talk about advertising and marketing and brand building. And since you work with a lot of big brands, and I am pretty much a hardcore direct response guy, I want to talk to you about that subject because you're an expert in it. And I'd like to first start with asking you to define what is a brand.

What is a brand is an interesting question because I agree with you. Most people don't know what it is and they mistake it for something else. Brands started literally, it comes from the word brandure, which was a term for burning an insignia to show ownership on cattle and other livestock. And that's literally where modern brands, the brand came from. So 400 years ago, brands were about livestock, and then they were set out by certain guilds to protect the purity of the product that that guild was trying to sell, like silver, like gold, and so on. Brands as a phenomenon in business, it's really been in the last probably 15 or 20 years, and that's become a topic of conversation, and it's really heated up in the last 10 or so. And there are iconic brands that we look to, like Disney, what a brand is. And I'll go back to Disney and Apple, which are both interesting examples. A brand is a story well told. That's what a brand is. And that story has to be about what the core value and core product is that you're trying to sell. Where the mistake is made a lot is in not drawing a distinction between a brand and branding. Branding is how you get the message out there through advertising, through marketing, through public relations. That's branding. But you have to start with a core message about the value of that company that resonate with their consumer base. And of course, you have to have the product behind it to deliver on that promise. Because a brand is a promise. So, for example, Disney, the brand is family entertainment. They deliver on that promise through their amusement parks and through their movies and.

That kind of thing.

It's family entertainment. And they've delivered on that promise very well. They're held up as one of the prime American brands. But when Disney was building the company, he didn't think about it as branding. He just wanted control over his business and over the image of his business. And there's an interesting footnote there. In terms of what Walt would do when evaluating the various opportunities that came his way or when he was thinking about initiating new ideas, what he would say is, what would Mickey do? Mickey was Mickey Mouse, but he used Mickey Mouse as his barometer for what he would do or not do. Would Mickey do this? I don't think so. It's not a good idea. And so those things that Mickey would do became brand extensions, those things that Mickey wouldn't do. And it was literally like that. That was literally the question posed in the meetings. Would Mickey do this? Jump ahead to Ralph Lauren. Ralph Lauren, his brand is associated with status and good taste. That's what his brand is about.

Can we refer to him as Ralph Lauren? Because I would prefer that, considering he.

Hires me, I'll pronounce it correctly, I don't have to worry about it. But you know, Ralph Lauren's brand proposition is status and good taste. Instead of the mouse ears, he's got the polo pony. But he's got his iconic brand symbol and the most valuable thing that any business has. This is true of Disney, this is true of Ralph Lauren, it's true of Apple. It's true of all the major brands is their brand equity. And that means what their brand means to a consumer public. So when Ralph was experiencing very difficult business times in the 90s before he went public, it wasn't the factories full of his clothes or the stores full of the finished fashion or the bolts of fabric. That's not what what made his company have such a high valuation. It was the brand equity he had built on a global scale that made that valuable and made that important. And creating that brand is a process that takes consistency in terms of establishing your brand signature, like family entertainment. That means if you're Disney, you don't do an X rated movie. You know, if you're Ralph Lauren, you don't do something that's cheap or not well done because that doesn't fall under the umbrella of status and good taste. And you Take a brand to its pinnacle, for instance. If I go like that, what brand is that?

Nike.

I mean, now think how amazing that is that I go like that. And you, my students, Parsons and so on, immediately know that that's Nike. Do you know how many hundreds of millions of dollars they spent on advertising and marketing, everything to embed that in our minds? The brand equity of Nike is astounding. What they've done similarly with Apple. You know, Apple stands for hip innovation, you know, and they do that through their design, through the incredibly effective marketing they do so that they announce things. And people are anticipating the next tablet, the next iPhone, the next whatever, whether they even need it, which most people don't. They want it because of how effectively they have built their brand equity.

Okay, well, let's take the Nike example, because if someone wants to, to just go out there and create a swoosh that in and of itself will never make a company.

Grow.

I mean, you take a company like Harley Davidson, where I think has some pretty serious brand loyalty, when you have your own clientele tattooing your logo and your name on their bodies, physically, I mean, that's taken it to a whole other level. And in order to get to something that like that, there's all of this stuff that needs to occur. And so I think when people try to model all of these companies that you talked about that are small business owners, they're going to have a pretty rude awakening if they don't have some pretty effective what's in it for me? Sort of messaging for people to first start buying, using, consuming, wearing, whatever before consumption starts. Brand in and of itself does not create sales. It may be one piece of it, but there's a whole infrastructure that goes along with it, a whole strategy. And that's what I'd like to kind of get some of your thoughts on.

Well, Nike, for instance, started as, you know, a unique athletic shoe. They first made the soles of the shoes on a waffle iron.

Right.

You know, so they had a unique product that was used by the Oregon track team, and it had a authenticity to its origin. So that swoosh stands for aspirational athletic achievement. That, you know, their phrase, which was brilliant and simple, just do it, you know, became part of the vernacular. But all of the underpinning of that was an authentic product that delivered on the promise. Same with Disney, same with Apple, same with Ralph Lauren. So if you think that you can throw all the money in the world, world in an ad campaign, you can maybe fool people once, but you can't build a brand because a brand requires repeat business and adding other members to the tribe, so to speak. But all of that is built on the foundation of an actual product that has to in some way enhance the value of the lives of people that buy it, whether it makes them just feel better or they feel they can run better, or they can enjoy their families at a vacation spot better, whatever it is. But you're right, there has to be that authenticity. And a lot of people just think if they promote the hell out of something, they can sell it. And they think that doing that makes them a brand, which it doesn't.

My favorite definition of branding came from David Ogilvy, or Brand, where he said, you know, a brand is the personality of your product or service. And I think that's just a great definition. And so I'd like to talk about, you know, obviously, a company that you spent a lot of time with, Victoria's Secret, and what is their strategy? How does it all work? I mean, is it the attractive models? Is it. What is it? I mean, what is the. What does their brand represent? What are they communicating? And when you put together a commercial for them, what are you wanting to convey?

Well, let me ask you. I'll flip it a bit. What does Victoria's Secret represent to you?

Seriously, what does it represent? Probably the best underwear, panties, undergarments, bras, etc. That a woman could buy that is sexy, that is hot, that allows any woman to have the association with beauty and sexiness and that sort of stuff.

And you're right, just like Nike is about the aspiration of athletic achievement, Victoria's Secret is about the aspiration of being sexy in beauty.

That's it. It's aspiring aspirational wear.

That's right.

Yeah.

So what they have done as a company and what is the brilliant strategy that they've employed is that they have worked with developing the idea of Victoria's Secret as that sexy, aspirational brand, yet tasteful, but also that they have created their. The personality of their brand through the models they've used over the years. So they've got.

Which is obviously a smart strategy.

I mean, part of what I've done with them in the video content that I create for them online is also allowing the personalities of the models to come through. So they aren't just beautiful women that are somehow objectified. You see, when you see Adriana Lima, you see somebody who's very funny and has just a great personality and she's.

A lot of fun.

You see the Dowdson who Has another kind of a personality. She was authentically an athlete and she's now one of the faces of the vsx, which is their sport apparel. She was a competitive speed skater before she was ever a model. So she's like authentic. When you see the workout tapes we've done with her, she does that stuff. I mean it's pretty impressive on a certain level. They become, if you will, accessible movie stars. People see them in the catalogs, they see them in the commercials, they see them online in the videos. Then they can go to the store and get a signed picture or even have their picture taken with them. So they have created an aspirational brand through employing very selective choices of these, what they call call supermodels that represent the brand. You know, that's an ever changing stable.

What is really being accomplished then when you put together, I mean, what is the. How do you know when it's working? How do you know when it's not?

Well, that's, you know, the multi million dollar question, depending on how large your brand is.

Well, yeah, because I mean, I guess a brand could like, you know, direct response guys, I would say have a call to action, drive them to a website, have a tractable mechanism, make a specific offer. When you're doing that, without all of that, how do you structure success?

Well, I think your question is how do you measure success? Yeah, right.

When I say structure, I mean how do you create it so it is successful? That's what I meant by structure success. How do you measure it?

I mean there is a strategy to getting the name out there. However, there's no one strategy. And as the marketplace, the way to reach consumers has gotten more and more splintered, you know, you have to do more innovative things to get in front of the consumers. I believe the most precious commodity out there now is people's attention. And to get their attention, to hold their attention and hopefully to be able to sustain it over time, which is what it takes to build a brand is a tough gal because oftentimes results are not immediate. You know, and to sort of plant your flag in a particular marketplace. I mean, nobody can think of women's lingerie without first thinking of Victoria Sevier. One of the reasons is they outspend everybody. But in their outspending everybody to capture that attention. They also make more money than any other lingerie company. Ralph Lauren spends probably more than any apparel company. Yet they make more money on a global scale than any apparel company. The strategies are again as you said, and it can't be repeated Enough. First of all, having the product that is going to be attractive to a consumer, having an authentic base from which to build your brand is critical. But even the smallest company, the smallest startup has got to start asking itself, what are the brand values that we're trying to imbue? What are the core values of our product? What is it we can say about our product? What does it do? Why does it make your life better? Why should anybody want it? That's key. Before you worry about how you get the message out there, first of all, you got to have a message to convey and a message that people don't hear and think, well, that's bullshit, I've seen it, it's crap. So it's got to be the first question you ask when you start a business. Is there a market for this? Whatever it is, whether it's a service or whether it's a product, Is there a market for it? Why is there a market for it? Who's my market? How do I reach that market? What websites do they go to or what TV shows do they watch? How do I capture their attention? Then after that, how do I build on the attention I've gotten? So not only will they come back in the ideal sense, and this happens very much with Apple, is that your consumers become evangelists for your brand.

Yeah. Which I think says everything about the substance of what you're selling, because I don't know of many long sustaining brands that were just pure crap that had any real competition come along. There's certainly brands that are cheap and there's certainly things like that, but they still in their own worlds. If there's going to be long, I mean, we're talking decades of sustainability. There has to be substance. And I think all of those things you discussed that are needed with a brand specific strategy. What's your purpose? All of that requires sophistication. It requires execution. So when someone just looks at a brand and says, oh, I've got this really cool web application, I'm going to be the next Facebook, it's like, well, there's a little more to it than that.

I think there's an illusion out there that it's easy to win the lottery.

Yeah.

So you see whether it's Facebook, which, you know, interestingly, since it's gone public, has performed horribly.

Right.

You know, and there's Google and there's those companies that are, you know, in the span of the business time line, quite new.

Yeah, yeah, very new. I mean, they're an infancy stage at the time.

We're recording this, right. Who have, you know, they've built a perceived equity that's very great. And, you know, one of the things that's changed from when I was in my 20s is that as opposed to embarking on a career or something, I know so many people because I'm in contact with them every day as you are, who devote their time and energy to starting a business. And if it doesn't go public or pop big, they're onto something else. Everybody's looking to grab that gold ring, but most of them just end up going in circles because the number of companies that turn into Facebook, that turn into those companies that blossom into huge businesses like that are very small. Most startups fail and a lot of them just incinerate money along the way.

Yes, totally.

It's really interesting because I don't think that the basic principles of business have changed. You know, you've got to have a desirable product or service that people are willing to pay for and they have to be willing to pay enough for it so that your business can grow.

Yeah. You've got to be able to price accordingly, position it properly, market at it effectively, or it's going to go nowhere. Because there's plenty of amazing, awesome products that never see the light of day because they have the whole strategy screwed up. I'm going to make a couple other points, but I want to ask you first about story, because you are a great storyteller. Even throughout the entire time that I've known you, you've sent me books here and there about stories, telling stories, stories. And it's critical in order to get your message out to the world. You got to tell your story. You got to tell a pretty damn incredible, better story than the next person if you want what you were talking about earlier, which is attention, because that's the economy that we live in, the attention economy.

Yeah.

I think that what's really interesting is storytelling is going back to our most primitive tribal selves when we sat around the campfire and told stories. And oftentimes the shaman or medicine man was the one that told the best stories because he created the illusion or perception that he could control the rain and the thunder and the crops coming up and whatever. Storytelling goes back to probably when there was more than one person in a room. And storytelling is a really nice term that relates to sales. You know, you have to tell the story of your product, the story of your brand. Salespeople are storytellers. You know, everybody is, to some degree or another, a storyteller if they're talking about something and they're hoping to capture your attention and then get some result. Whether it's persuasive sales, forming some kind of alliance or whatever. It's all about the stories we tell. That's how we bond as human beings, is through our stories. All of these things. I mean, storytelling is huge. So it's huge in terms of communicating what's important or what we want people to believe is important in things. So you go back to our most primitive selves, and then you apply that idea of storytelling to the most cutting edge technology. And if you don't have storytelling as a part of that technology, then it's like a car without a spark plug. That ingredient will keep the whole mechanism from moving forward.

Okay, so how does someone tell a good story? How do you do it?

I think that, you know, you can certainly look to Hollywood for telling good stories. You know, getting your attention, holding your attention. And of course, the best movies are kind of timeless stories. So I think that storytelling means that in a traditional sense, there's a beginning, middle, end and end. You know, when you think of childhood stories, it's once upon a time. You know, you get something going with engaging your listener from the beginning, but you have to make them somehow feel a part of it. Either that they can benefit from that story that you're telling them, they will be entertained. I mean, just like education, which I consider an act of seduction. In other words, my students need to want to know what I've got to say. That's also the same thing for sales. That's also the same thing for an actor on stage. You know, it's all of those things, you know, when I've seen you and, you know, I hate to say it, but you're brilliant in terms of on stage, your storytelling, whether you're telling the stories about your guests that you're bringing up to speak or what people can accomplish, that's storytelling. And I think that it's storytelling, I think, is both a skill in understanding how to do it and an art form in terms of how you do it. So there's the ingredients and construct of the story, which is the skill part, and then there's the art of it, which is being able to tell a compelling story and hold people's attention.

Every time you communicate, you have an opportunity to influence people's lives for the better. But it's challenging to remember that because we have so much pressure in our day and so many projects to complete. And what happens is we get into this conveyor Belt mindset. And for many of us, time as entrepreneurs can feel very tight. It can feel almost like this conveyor belt that moves along in a linear and limited fashion. And on this conveyor belt, we imagine there are empty boxes. And our job is to pack each box with as many activities as we can just getting through the day so that at night we can lie in our bed and say, that was a good day. Look at all the things I did. So a day for you on your entrepreneurial conveyor belt might look something like this. You're asleep, all cozy in your bed, the alarm goes off and we often grab our phone right away. And we're in our phone and we're squinting into the light, checking our emails. We get undressed, we get in the shower, we get dressed, maybe we have breakfast with the kids, we send them off, we get in our car and we drive to work. And if we're like Joe Polish, we're making video messages while we're driving, we get to work, we're on the phone, we're on our emails, we've got opt ins and surveys, squeeze pages and funnels, we've got teleseminars and webinars. You're working on the book, you're working on the blog, you're eating lunch at your desk to make up for a lost time. You have a client meeting, you have a question, client call, you have a meeting about a meeting, more things. You've got spreadsheets and excels, you're working at Facebook and Twitter and maybe you're lucky, you get to the gym, you change your clothes and you're at the gym and you're on the bicycle, you're on the treadmill, you take pilates. Pilates, yoga, breathe. Bicep, biceps, tricep, ab. Bicep, biceps, triceps, ab. We're in yoga, we're checking our emails in yoga. We go home, we pick up gluten free bagels and green juice and gross sweets. We put the them ore three more things done. We have dinner with the family, we send them off to bed, we get in bed, we channel surf, we're looking at our favorite TV show, we read our book on spirituality. But then we check our email one more time and we go to sleep. And that's considered a good day. And that's just Sunday. So if we're in this time crunch, how do we reconnect with what really matters? How do we communicate in a fast paced world? And so I'd like to share with you a strategy I've Given my top clients, which has not only changed their perception of what they're doing in their business, but their perception of who they really are. And it's the foundation before you even plan your communications. So I'm going to ask you a question here, and I'm going to ask you to close your notebooks, your computers, put down your pens, and trust the first response that comes to you. So in other words, don't second guess your first idea. And the question is, if you were on a desert island and you were dying, but there was a young person there with you, someone whom you cared deeply about, and you could only give that young person one piece of advice before you died about life and how to live it, what would that piece of advice be? And whatever just flew into your head is the starting of the thread of what I call your through line, the driving force behind your life. For some of you, it might be life is a game, enjoy it. For others, it might be follow your dreams. Some might say, don't be afraid to be yourself or be kind. Some business minded friends of mine have said, find someone who is the success that you want and model it. Whatever it was that you said, what you believe in the end really matters in life. And so my challenge to you is how do you take your business and make it an expression of that through line that drives you through your life so that you're not on the conveyor belt, but you understand that all, all these details, these duties, these data, these deadlines add up to something, what I call your noble intent, that you're fusing that constantly. Because when we don't, our day does feel frazzled. So when you reconnect with what really matters and you start positioning and packaging and creating your communication materials to support that noble intent, it takes you from a transactional entrepreneur, not just to transformational, but to transcendent. Because your customers, your clients, your audience, whether it's one or 1000 or millions, knows that you understand in the end a higher purpose. So then your next challenge becomes, if your customers, your clients and your audience are on that conveyor belt, how do you take them off? Well, if the challenge is that everyone is busy, then what is the solution? I think it's to stop time. Bob Dylan said, the purpose of art is to stop time. And I think that's true. Great art stops time. When you're in a movie, you're out of the conveyor belt, time has stopped. When you see an extraordinary play or you go to a rock concert, you're not on the Conveyor belt, you're transported. Or a rock concert of any kind, a symphony, a great book, a beautiful painting, an amazing meal, that is a work of art. So if art stops time, then the challenge for you becomes how do you turn your communication, your business, your busyness into an art? How do you make every experience for those that you serve so extraordinary that it takes them out of time and off that conveyor belt? And I think when we do that, we've provided a great service and we lead them towards a noble intent, ideally theirs, what matters to them. So here's what puts people back on the conveyor belt. And I think it's the biggest mistake I've seen made. Whether you're in a sales pitch or a keynote, doing your two minute video, your two day training, your 20 minute TED talk, is that people tend to focus too much on the information they want to convey and not enough on the experience they're creating. Because if you think back to a great communication setting you were part of, what you remember is not just all the information, but how that information came to you, the experience of it. And if it's an extraordinary communication, it took you out of time. So rather than think of creating, Sorry, rather than think of giving information, think of creating an experience. A client meeting could be an experience. Your two day training could be an experience. Not what are we going to teach? What's all the content we're going to teach, but how are we going to do that? A conversation could be an experience. So how do you do that? How do you create that experience? Well, if you think of your through line, that question, that answer that I just gave you for your noble intent from the desert island, if you think of that beaming through your business, your presentation, imagine that as a triangle, then what comes out the other side are all the different ways that you can express it. So I often think of it like a prism. Your throughline is like the white light. It's your message. And then all the different ways you can express that and the extraordinary part of a prism that we take for granted. Oh yeah, I know optics, Newton prisms. But think about it. What makes that light so bright is the combination of colors. When you start restricting yourself and pulling colors out, you dim your light. And what does this mean for you as an entrepreneur, as a person? Well, so often we get in our industry and say, well, I'm an insurance, I'll do it like everyone else. Well, I'm an Internet marketer, I'll do it like everyone else while I'm in healthcare. I'll have to dress and act and sound like everyone else. And we start to shave off parts of who we really are and we cut ourselves off and we put ourselves into a mold and we lose our light as well. Your audience, we all know this adult learning, they need different modalities. Absorb your information. So if you're always expressing it in one color and not the full spectrum, they may not receive it the way you want. So you think, here's my through line, here's my message. What are all the different ways that I can express that so that they receive what it is I'd like to share? And as you begin to do this, you create this mesmerizing, mesmerizing experience for your audience. So there are three parts you want to consider in any presentation and if you're missing any one of these, you'll falter. You have to have extraordinary content. You have to have great material, but then you need to structure it properly and you need to deliver it with excellence. If you have great delivery skills and charisma, but no content, it's a problem. If you've got content, but it's not well structured, it's a problem. So you need all these three things, not unlike a three legged stool, for it to be cohesive, to connect and to land. Some people speak in all one color. Courage, action, determination. Ladies and gentlemen, this is the triad of success and I am here. And that, that is exhausting. And then you see people who feel they have to be all pastel. Hello everyone, my name is Maya Diora. Let's talk about meditation and mindfulness. Did anyone see the Matrix?

And they're not.

And you sense somewhere they're not who they really are. There's some phoniness, there's sort of a false Persona because they're afraid to show who they really are. And then you see presenters who are over coached. You can't tell what color they are. They've lost all their light. They're like black. They've lost all their light and they look like this. All right, let me do my presentation for you. They come into my studio in New York City.

Ready?

Hello everyone. I am so honored. And I say to them, what you doing there? They'll say, well, I worked with this coach. They told me a hint. I said, well, how does that feel? They go, it feels a little weird. And I say, it looks a little weird because they've lost who they really are. So what you're looking for is that full expression of your personality, your creativity, your unique approach. So what you want to do next is take the audience on a journey, take them out of time like a film director takes them out of time. And the way I have my clients do this, this is the number one time saving technique. Joe's using it, jj, Kellyanne, Lisa Sasevich, the people I've coached. If you look at it like this, you're taking the audience on a journey, whether you're planning the keynote. I've done it for my large scale keynote events. And here's Joe texting me with Dean Jackson. They were putting together a project. Here's JJ putting together her PBS special. We're in her hotel room planning it. Here's the head of jcdeco. They do all the advertising at airports, the concessions. So we're working. We put together a $400 million pitch. We won it using this system. And Microsoft. Think about it. Microsoft invented PowerPoint. So at first they were very resistant to working on index cards. They're like, no, we'll do it in our PowerPoint. But this is Takeshi Nomoto, who runs Windows 365. We put his presentation together, together and rocked it. And here is my client, John Roskill, 17,000 in the audience. All of this created with index cards and taking the audience on a journey to take them out of time and stop time. So here are some of the elements you can consider. It's a busy slide. You can take a photo. All of these create different experiences for your audience. Maybe you have a challenging question, you have a key point, then you have them doing an interactive exercise. You're doing a little video, and throughout, you're taking them on this unexpected journey so they never see what's coming next. What makes it boring and long is when it's one color, you want variety. The audience craves variety. And so the last element I want to share with you is this, to craft your first and your final moment. There is no work of art in the performing arts that begins and ends randomly. And yet most presentations kind of do. Most meetings kind of do. Most meetings actually end with a final moment that is a Q& A. And you never want to end on a Q and A because you're giving your final moment to chance instead. You want to close with something that you know you can control your video, your story, your bit, your quote. And so my final moment for you is to share with you something I learned from my great mentor, which is to take what could be a transactional element, in his case mime, Marcel Marceau, the great French mime, and take it from transactional to transcendent. So for him, it wasn't just a bird. It wasn't just a wall or a rope. If he was the bird, it was. And that is my hope for all of you to stop time. Take an experience, make it one that takes the audience off their conveyor belt, because that is how you rock the room.

You know how companies spend millions of dollars on advertising and they go out there. I mean, if you just watch the super bowl, you'll see how much money they spend on advertising. But what I've learned is if they combine that with some public relations, they actually will get a bigger bang for their buck. And this morning we talked about marketing and how many different ways there are to market to your audience. I find there's 13 different ways. One of them is public relations and speaking. That is one tactic under marketing. So that's what we're going to talk about today. So what do I mean by free speech? Joel always tells us to make sure we tell you exactly what we're thinking when we give you a term. A free speech is something that you're not getting paid for and you can't make an offer from stage. So you're really just giving something to the community or connecting with someone, or in this case, being here at Genius Network. This is an opportunity for a free speech by being a member. It's one of the benefits that we get, which all of us should be using, and I'm glad I'm using it today with you guys. Here's some ways that you can do free speeches for your audience. Of course, there's YouTube, Facebook Live, which we're doing a Facebook Live right now, webinars, social media, all of those things. And I should let you know at the end, I will give you a way to get this presentation so you don't have to take notes. You can just enjoy it. And I will also give you a couple gifts at the end as well. So I'm going to talk about Pixar, who's an iconic brand now and happens to be. This is a view that I see on the way to my daughter's school. When I drop her off in the morning, I actually go right by Pixar. And I'm inspired by the creativity that's going on inside of there. But, you know, in 1986, it was just an idea. And Steve Jobs and two of his friends put this in as a side project. It wasn't even their main focus. And they went around and they gave so many free speeches and they Told so many people about what they were doing as an innovative and creative company, right? They were being mind blowing out there, but no one knew who they were. And they spent all this time and they even went to Disney and said, disney, we want you to be part of this. And Disney's like, no way. Don't want to have anything to do with it. We don't see this in our future. Do you know, 20 years later, Disney paid over $7 billion for Pixar. But in those first years when they were doing free speeches and they were getting out there and giving the word, other people couldn't see into the vision, but they saw their vision and they stuck with it. And that's the key. They were consistent, they kept getting the message out there and they stuck with their vision. So me personally, I love working with global companies, companies that really want to make an impact and a positive impact around the world. I've worked with companies in finance for many, many years in lifestyle business, including my own company and pets. My husband's a world class veterinarian and so I support him in that industry. And that industry brought me to our biggest conference just a month ago. And at that conference were 17,000 attendees. And I was invited to a free and beautiful breakfast with Jack Hanna in the penthouse. And there were about 20 of us invited while there's 17,000 people at the conference who can't wait to meet him. Well, during that two or three hours that we spent together, a lot of people were asking him all about animals and all about the things that he did in the world around animals. And he would give a lot of canned answers and things he said a lot. Well, I had the opportunity to sit with him and his wife for a little bit and I was asking him about his media and he just lit up talking about it. He's like, no one ever asked me this and so I just asked him, how did you get started? And he goes, I got started because we had an ape in captivity that was going to have a baby. And what we wanted to do is get the word out. So he went to the local news station, local news station put him on. Then Good Morning America saw it, they invited him on and you know the rest after that. He spent the next years having 200 times that he 200 presentations on the David Letterman show. Now the thing is, in the beginning he only got paid zero, nothing. He paid his own way. He paid his transportation, he paid his hotel room. Over time he got a $75 stipend every time he came in so that's pretty close to free if you're flying to New York. He said at the very end, at his 200th appearance, he started getting $125. But what happened was he built a global brand. And now this little zookeeper who in the beginning just asked for one little story that's blossomed into another, and he said yes at every single opportunity. He's now worth over $8 million. There's very few people in veterinary medicine or in zoos that can claim that. But it was really wonderful to see how it touched his life just by saying yes. So every time you speak, you have the opportunity to create the next opportunity. I mean, that's what happens. Everyone gets up here and they talk about the last time they were here and the things that happened in between. Well, it wouldn't have happened unless they took the chance to come up here. So what you want to do in your company is create buzz around the things that you want to get out there. If you're wanting to tell the world what you do and how you do it, create a way to share that. Like, we're watching Carrie, who's doing it on Facebook Live. We're watching people sharing it on social media. We're watching Joe, who's doing it in many different fashions. And it was really interesting because the reason I'm inspired to even share this with you today is because the last meeting I was here, Joe had mentioned he spent over $300,000, which he reminded me, was $360,000 on an advertising campaign. And the advertising campaign got the name out, got his name in all these beautiful publications. But what I told him is, what if he took that $360,000, split it in half, put half into advertising and half in pr? I think I would have gotten him a bigger bang for his buck. He would have gotten so much more attention, and it would have been better attention because it would have been articles written about him, not just advertisements. So that is what sparked me to want to come to you guys today is to start thinking when you're putting together your marketing budgets. Take some time, take some energy in getting the news out to the media. The media is thirsty to tell your stories, and all it takes is one phone call and the connection and the follow through. Richard Branson is mentioned every single time in this meeting. I don't have to put his name up. I don't have to put anything up there. But, you know, he's done many free speeches in his life, too, and he's thought about many different ways to support his community and his clients. And can you believe those are his brands? Now that I have nine, I feel like I'm really behind the times. Right. I'm not there. But he is managing all these because he's thinking about all the ways to connect with his ideal client. And do you know every one of those brands has a spokesperson and every one of those brands has somebody who's putting out regular news releases and calling media and telling them what's going on. And that's why when we open USA Today or Forbes, our entrepreneur, we're constantly seeing his name out there because he's consistently getting the story out there and it's really something that you can do as well. Right now he's worth $5.1 billion. And it all started with just little ideas, consistency, and building great teams to help him do it. So my recommendation to all of you is to look at these companies. Prcon, PR Newswire, PR Insight, PR Web. Put a profile up there, get things ready so that when you have news to share, which frankly should be at least once a month, if not once a week, something that's going on in your company, a new talent that you acquired, a new software that you're working with, a new collaboration, at least get the word out there so the media get used to seeing your name and who you are. And the biggest key is they won an award with infusionsoft. It's their elite business of the year. For my PR marketing company, which was extraordinary. But the next day my team went and created a news release, got it out on the wire, and then within two days, I had interviews with Entrepreneur magazine, Forbes magazine, Huffington Post. They sent me a list of all the places the news release was put, 20 pages, all around the country, all around the world that never would have known who I was if we didn't get the word out about this. Infusionsoft is even happy because their name is being circulated with it. So not only am I happy, but the person who gave me the award is sending me a thank you note saying, wow, we love all this attention for our company. And that's how you get attention, is by creating a way for the media to talk about you, for social media to talk about you to go viral, especially if it's a great and interesting story. Now this is a meme that I put up in November 2015, in January 2016, all of a sudden it went viral. On a Friday, it had a million views. By the following Friday, it had 40 million reach. It was Unbelievable how many people were looking at this meme. So I have a little thing here. 40 million reach, 328,000 shares, 2,800 comments. And it was just by sharing something that Julia Roberts, I mean, we all know she's a movie star, and she was actually sharing something that was a quote from someone else. It wasn't even her quote, but it had this huge reach. But the beauty of this is it added 25,000 names to our email list who are interested in talking about what we're interested in talking about. And it let us put them in a category where we have conversations with them based on this topic. So how would you like to add 25,000 names, actually more than $25,000. 25,000 names to your list. You can do that just as well. So paying attention to your community, planting the seeds exactly like Joel said, these are coming up a little bit faster. But I will tell you, planting the seeds is so important. Watering them, nurturing them, looking at the ways to not only get connected, but to stay connected. Look in this room, everyone you're connected to, how do you create a way to stay connected? And then building your tribe both online and offline, in person and online, so when you speak, you get more exposure, more opportunities, and more connections. We've established that there. And I'll tell you what, these guys are doing it. I'm doing it. And I know that you guys can do it, too. And I hope that I was able to prove to you today that there is power in a free speech at the Genius Network.

Okay?

I hope you found that video awesome and useful. So if you want to get a free copy of my book, I want you to click here. And if you want to watch some more videos that'll be useful and awesome, click here. Go ahead. You're over here. Do it now.

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