What I Learned About Personal Branding from Kevin Tupy

Hey, guys, Matt Paulson here. A couple of weeks ago, I was invited to attend a Christmas party that entrepreneur Kevin Tupy held for his real estate and business development firm, which is Creston Capital Holdings. The event was held at the new Tavern180 restaurant, which is at 69th and Western. The food was really, really good. I highly recommend it. I like chicken parmesan there, and it also had the salmon there, also really good. But the party was attended by some very prominent leaders in the Sioux Falls real estate and downtown business community. And it was just a great event all around. And going to the event really just got me thinking about Kevin's career and the businesses that he's built and just how he has become one of the most successful and prominent business leaders in our community. He's built a network of hundreds, actually over a thousand Verizon stores under the Z Wireless, now called Victra brand. He owns at least 20 retail buildings and apartment properties in Sioux falls. He owns four downtown buildings. His investment firm, Creston, has invested over 100 million in real estate and operating companies just around the country. Owns a private jet, and he even has a watch collection that is as good or better than mine, which is great. Kevin's just a really cool guy. He's had an incredibly successful career. But what I think is most interesting about him is that he just doesn't fit anyone's mold. And he doesn't do a lot of the things that you would think that a business owner might spend their time doing in Sioux Balls. He just doesn't go to a lot of professional networking events or a chamber of commerce mixer, stuff like that. Doesn't do those things. He's very charitable, but there's also not any big, flashy corporate sponsorships that bear either his name or the name of his companies. And he's much more likely to be seen wearing a live long and prosperous Star Trek T shirt made by his own T shirt company than either a blazer or a suit or anything that you would expect a business owner to wear. He also doesn't spend a lot of time trying to get press coverage. He doesn't try to win a bunch of business awards. This guy has never written a blog post, let alone a book. Yet somehow he is one of the top 10 business leaders in our community in terms of past business success and probably personal wealth as well. He just kind of does things his own way, works very hard, but he really isn't concerned about playing the game or really what other people think about him. If you want to make a Name for yourself and really be successful like Kevin has. There's kind of a standard list of best practices. You can find these on any Google search for personal branding and making a name for yourself. And this list is like define who you want your audience to be to create content so that you can become an industry expert like I'm doing now. Develop an online presence. They would tell you to go to in person networking events. They would tell you to get a professional headshot and to identify some performance metrics to track to see if you're being successful with your name making and branding efforts. I talked to Kevin and he says he hasn't done any of those things and he's never really actively tried to build a personal brand. Yet there he is. As a successful entrepreneur, he has every business connection he would ever need. Lots of friends. He's also very well known in the business community. As I've gotten to know Kevin over the last couple years, the really big lesson that I've learned from him is that doing interesting work, building a successful business, and just generally being impressive is a hundred times more important than trying to look impressive. It's not about the well polished LinkedIn profile. It's not about having a fancy suit, a nice watch to go into networking events. All those things really don't matter unless you're also being a mover and doing things and not just a handshaker. Being a mover is more important than being a handshaker, really. If you build a successful business that many people in your community know about, you may not need to go to a lot of networking events because people are going to be knocking on your door wanting to do business with you. They're going to want to get your advice. They're going to want you to invest in their businesses. People are going to want to be around you because of what you've accomplished and the value that you've created in the world. You might not need to go seek out speaking engagements because people will ask you to speak to their organizations. You may not need to try to get media coverage because if you're doing really interesting work, the media will probably cover you anyway. Your personal brand will eventually kind of build itself just because of the success that you've had in your career. And it's really interesting to see that in Kevin's life and other people's lives in our business community. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that personal branding efforts aren't effective or have no value, but they just won't be very effective. Unless your personal branding efforts are backed by a person that is doing genuinely impressive work. If you're a junior financial advisor, God bless you. If you are, and you have a well polished Resume, a killer LinkedIn profile, and an Instagram profile that would make a Kardashian jealous, you're still a junior financial advisor and there's an upper limit as to what kind of personal brand you can do, having done that type of work. So I'd suggest if you focus your time and your energy and your attention and doing kind of actually impressive work, the rest will follow that work. If you build a fantastic business that people know about, you can do some basic personal branding later and build a much more successful and larger personal brand than just being who you are today and trying to brand that as somebody that people would want to know. That's it for this video. Thanks for watching.