Rory Vaden: URGENT: Do Not Build Your Brand Without Watching This (wait until you hear the secret!)

If this is the number one secret of building a best selling personal brand, I'm going to offer something that I think is so simple but so overlooked. The secret is to be able to answer one question and to be able to answer that question in one word.

When you think of LeBron James, you would think of what? Basketball? When you think of Taylor Swift, you'd think of a what singer? When you think of Steve Jobs, you think of Apple. Genius. Yeah. What do people think when they think about you or just hear your name? When people think of me, they think of probably crazy, but they think of Genius, Network or Addiction. These are personal brands which are very different than corporate brands. Your name needs to be associated with your personal brand. Half the battle of personal branding is separating yourself from all the noise that's out there. The best way to do that is to sharpen and focus in on who you are. This is an area that Roy Vaden has specialized in for over 15 years. Rory became a New York Times best selling author when he was just 29 years old. He also gave a TED talk that has 2.5 million views and was recently named one of the top 100 leadership speakers in the world by Inc. Magazine. He and his wife AJ Also built an eight figure sales coaching company that they just recently exited. Their new business is called Brand Builders Group where they teach people how to build and monetize their personal brand. Today they work with well known clients like Lewis Howells from the school of Greatness, but also speak with people who are just starting out and considering writing a book or building a speaking career or growing an online community. I've asked Rory to focus his message on what you can do to build your own personal brand. The title is the number one secret to building a best selling personal brand. Please help me welcome Roy Vaden.

Thank you, brother. Thank you, Joe. Thank you for that thoughtful personalized introduction that was exactly as Joel Weldon wrote it. Also, it's also I'm ecstatic and thrilled to be the first speaker that comes up after the criteria for speaker judgment has been set. Wonderful spot. So, quick question. How many of you are happily married? Okay. How many of you are just married? A few of you. So I am happily married and my wife AJ Is my business partner. She was in our former venture and she is now. And AJ is a do gooder, a checklister, a taskmaster. She runs the house, runs the business. Well, when we got married, we were at the county clerk's office and we were filling out the marriage license form and you know the top half is all about the woman's information. So she writes in there, her name, her birthday, her Social Security number. Well, she gets down to the bottom half of the form, which is supposed to be all about the husband. Well, rather than giving it to me to fill out, naturally she decides she's just going to go ahead and fill this out for me. So she writes in my name, my birth date, my Social Security number. She gets down to the last question on the form, which is about ethnicity. And she writes in for me, Caucasian. And I looked at her and I was like, honey, what are you doing? And she said, what? I said, you just wrote down Caucasian? She goes, yeah. So I said, honey, I'm Mexican. And I think it was the first moment it dawned on her that she was actually about to marry a Mexican man. I mean, for a minute I wondered if she was gonna still go through with the whole thing. Cause she was shocked. But she knew my grandmother was born in Mexico. She knew my mom's maiden name was Real Vazquez, but she didn't think about it in that way. And that sort of reminded me of what is a brand really? A brand is simply what do people think of when they think of you? That's it. And it's actually that simple. When you go, how do you build a best selling brand? Is you have to be intentional and mindful about what do you want people to think of when they think of you? So that is the question for you to kind of answer is, okay, what do people think of when they think of me? Now the best part of that story, a couple days later, we were at the rehearsal dinner getting married, and our families were all meeting for the first time.

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And AJ Told me to tell that story. So I told it at the rehearsal dinner. My whole family, when they heard it, they started cracking up. They thought it was hilarious. They were like doubled over with laughter. Her whole side of the family, at the exact same time, all look at each other and they're like, he's Mexican. So anyways, here is the challenge with personal brands. The challenge is noise. There's so much noise. And I want to show you a visual. This is something we call Sheehan's Wall. Because I originally heard this concept kind of from a guy named Peter Sheehan. And he talks about how there's sort of this invisible wall. And on one side of any industry there are people who are unknown. And then everyone's trying to break through, to really become known. And what happens is you get all of this different advice about you should have these different messages, right? You should talk about whatever is the hot topic, or you should be in all these different mediums, right? You should be on Medium and LinkedIn and Instagram or whatever, or all these different business models. Like I need to have a membership or no, I need video courses or it's coaching or consulting. And we end up trying to do all of these different things. And what happens is that you have incredible brand dilution.

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

The people who break through the wall do one simple thing is they focus all of their energy, their resources, their efforts into becoming known for one thing first. And you become the expert on one thing and then you break through the wall and once you're on the other side of the wall, then you can expand and be known for other people things. Lots of other things. The best advice I ever heard on this topic was actually from a guy named Larry Wingate. And he said the whole key to finding your person or to building a great brand is to find your uniqueness so that you can exploit it in the service of others. Find your uniqueness so you can exploit it in the service of others. So this brings us then to the question of what is, how do you do that? Right? If this is the number one secret of building a best selling personal brand, I'm gonna offer something that I think is so simple but so overlooked. The secret is to be able to answer one question and to be able to answer that question in one word. And the question is simply, what problem do I solve? What problem do you solve? See, people buy solutions to problems. It's not that often that we just go buy luxury items. Generally speaking, people buy solutions to problems. And most of the people when we first start working with brands, they can't answer that question with one word, what problem do I solve? They don't know. And here's what we know for sure. If you aren't clear on the problem you solve, there is no way your audience, your prospects, your customers will ever know either. And if you look at some real modern examples of some breakthrough personal brands, right? Brene Brown spent two decades becoming the expert on shame, just that one concept. This is another person who's got huge, over 800 employees. Now Dave Ramsey has. I knew Dave, I met Dave when he had 250 employees and they have grown so fast. He owns the word debt. That's the only problem he talks about and solves. Simon Sinek did this with purpose. One of our clients, as he mentioned, is Lewis Howes. His entire personal brand is oriented around the self doubt and helping people overcome that even on a global scale. Right? You look at Mother Teresa, poverty, Martin Luther King Jr. Inequality inside of Genius Network, we have some good examples of this. So Barbara, I know she's not here, but gender, intelligence, Andre Norman, you know, when you think of him it's kind of like also addiction. You've got Jason Fladlin with webinars, you've got Joel with presentation skills and then Russell Brunson with funnels. And then of course our very own Joe Polish, the world's leading expert on hair loss. So what problem do you solve? If you can answer that question, you can be a best selling brand. But until you get clarity on that question, you're really going to struggle because you have to sell the problem as much as you sell the solution. You have to become an ambassador of the problem. And that was what we did. So my wife and I just exited our business that we spent 12 years building this past May. And the problem that we really went after was procrastination. And my first book, Take the Stairs, that was the big New York Times bestseller and everything and it was all about procrastination. And then our second book, which is what the TED talk was about, is how to multiply time. But the problem is a problem we invented called priority dilution, which is basically the chronic overachievers procrastination. And when you get clear on this, you also actually spend time studying it and you advance the thinking that has been done in that area because you have so much focus and some of you may not like this, but you still have to do it right? Even if you don't like it, it's just a truth. This is a conversation I had with my 2 year old son this last Halloween was that even if you don't like it, sometimes you just have to do it. And he didn't have much choice, but he got to dress up as a panda bear. So what problem do you solve? So the problem that we solve now, our company, Brand Builders, is obscurity is people who are untrusted, unknown or unclear. That's what we help people really solve. And we walk people through a simple process, what we call the Brand DNA helix. And you can snap a quick picture of this if you want. It's six basic questions that, as you answer these six questions for each person, you find at the intersection between who the world needs you to be and who you were designed to be. At that intersection is where your uniqueness lives, the uniqueness between who the world needs you to be and who you were designed to be. So you just kind of brainstorm the answers to these six questions, and then you're looking for the overlap or sort of the through line. So if that is something that you struggle with, I'd be happy to talk with you sometime over the next couple days, just come and say hello. But the last thing I want to leave you with really is the number one biggest mistake that people make with their personal brand. And it's more of a mental mistake than anything.

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And the big mistake is that you don't want to make your personal brand about you. Your personal brand is not about you. Your personal brand is about the problem that you solve in the service of others. And some of you have been resistant to building a personal brand because you say, oh, I don't understand that technology, or I don't like the Facebook, or I don't have time for this or whatever it is. But I guarantee you, whenever you have those limiting beliefs, it's because you're thinking about yourself and you're not thinking about the people who need the solution to the problem that you were uniquely designed to solve. You see, you never feel fear when the mission to serve is clear. And so if you're afraid or you're resistant, it's because you're thinking about yourself, Period. That's the biggest mistake that everybody makes with the personal brand. So it's not about ego, it's not about vanity. It's about solving a problem. And if we all are addicted to something, which some people make the case that we are, if we are all addicted to something, then service is just the addiction with the best byproducts. Thank you very much.

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