175: How Rachel and Dave Hollis Destroyed Their Million-Dollar Brand

If you're a longtime listener to this podcast, I'm sure this clip will sound familiar.

Someone commented and said, you are privileged af. And I was like, you're right, I'm super freaking privileged. But also I worked my ass off to have the money to have someone come twice a week and clean my toilets. And I told her that. And then she said, well, you're unrelatable. What is it about me that made you think I want to be relatable?

As unrelatable as it was, it relates to a problem for self help influencers who go astray. Welcome to the Indestructible PR Podcast where we use current events and tested media and PR strategies to help you manage a crisis and build an indestructible reputation. This is an episode about reputation and the cost when it's damaged. Joining me on the podcast is Dave Irwin. He's a social media strategist, marketing expert out of Toronto, Canada. And one of the more fascinating things about him, not just his in depth knowledge of social media, marketing, publishing, influencing also that he happened to be a follower of Rachel and Dave Hollis. He and I meet up every week in a Twitter spaces dedicated to PR and communication professionals. You can join us, it's the PRLunch Hour every week on Twitter. It's fabulous. But Dave will always bring the business analysis to PR issues. PR crises that happen out there and he fascinates me. But that wasn't the most fascinating thing. When he told me on Instagram that he had opinions on the Hollis brand, I knew right away I have to talk to you about it on the podcast. Now I know for many of you you may not even be a Hollis fan. You might not even know the name or what it means. If that's the case, feel free to check back in next week. But for those of you who are familiar with the brand, you may want to stick around for this conversation. I live streamed it on YouTube. It was the first time I ever did that, so you can watch it as well on my YouTube channel. But Dave and I delved into this idea of influencers meeting up with a crisis and how do they survive when their followers flee? Rachel and Dave Hollis, two mega influencers really Rachel was, and her husband eventually became CEO. But they hit a major roadblock when Rachel released that video on TikTok. It turned into a PR crisis that she still has not recovered from to this day. So take a listen if you're interested in influencers and how they handle a PR crisis. Unsuccessfully.

So welcome. You and I are going to spend a brief amount of time, though we could probably spend hours discussing this. The Hollis brand, made up of Rachel Hol and her now ex husband, Dave Hollis. We won't go too much into the details of how they got there. A lot of people are familiar with the brand, but we want to look at it from a marketing, social media, small business entrepreneur, influencer, self help point of view. But before we start, Dave, tell the listeners a little bit about yourself.

Okay. My name is Dave Irwin. I am a marketer, live in Toronto. Clearly I'm not from Toronto originally, I'm from Ireland and I come to marketing by way of sort of global banking. That's where my background is in. So that's why, that's why I tend to focus on the business side of.

Marketing, which I love. And that is the reason why you're here today. You and I met, well, I mean naturally on social media, media, and one aspect of your talent that I grew to appreciate. You and I are. We meet frequently in a weekly Twitter spaces, the PR Lunch Hour. And it's this great collaboration collection of PR and communication types who all work, who all touch pr. But it seems like we all have different spaces in there. We have, you know, there's marketing, there's crisis pr, there's business pr, corporate pr, nonprofit pr. I love joining in on this and what you talked about. There were two things that intrigued me to bring you on to this, to this episode is one, whenever we bring up an issue, whether it's the NFL or Peloton, you know, whatever it is, you always bring in the business angle, the analytical business side of it, which I find valuable. But then you're on this specific podcast because surprise you let me know that you follow the Hollis brand. I thought, oh God, I gotta snag this guy. So just tell me briefly why a guy in Toronto, originally from Ireland, is following the Hollis brand, the self help guru out of first California and then Texas.

So it comes from my love of reading Ferocious Reader. I read a book a day. But when I, Rachel released Girl Wash Her Face because I read so much and it was so highly recommended. You know, we, we saw it on Good Morning America. As you said, we, I believe maybe even Oprah mentioned it at one stage. It was one of those big books that was pushed in the sort of self development and self development tends to skirt into business books quite a bit. There's a lot of overlap there. And so I picked up the book and I read a chapter and a half and I put the book down. Did that Finish dnf.

I had a. I had a very similar experience with it. I just a background. I've been an entrepreneur for a number of years and I knew a lot of other females in the space, you know, the online entrepreneur space, which naturally led me to a place where I recognized that my many of them were Christian and they congregate in churches and they build around community. And Rachel Hollis was a name in this group and someone sent me the Rachel Hollis book and I thought, oh, okay, I'll give it a try. And I remember I was getting a pedicure at the time and I thought, what a great time to dive in when I'm doing a little bit of self care like you. I think I lasted a chapter and a half. Yeah, it just wasn't for me.

It's, it's, it's a very, there's a very specific sort of late, early 2000s sort of like that, that early 2000s time that that hashtag Girlboss girl bossing it up overlap with Instagram kind of started to take off. And I think Rachel definitely jumped on that and was able to build both her brand and her conference business brand based off of that viral Instagram post that everybody remembers her from.

So let's start there then. And what we want to discuss today, why I wanted to bring you on, is so many people and so many people on YouTube and on Reddit and just different Facebook groups out there love talking about the Hollis brand and really love watching the downfall, definitely from a schadenfreude point of view, because some people truly feel betrayed by this brand. I'm there, I'm just utterly fascinated by it because to me it's watching a PR crisis in real time by two people who are not handled by teams. You're seeing people in their native surroundings, like, how does an average person, and really they're just like you and me when it comes to, you know, dealing with, you know, with a crisis. Like, how do they react? So I've been fascinated from that point of view.

Yeah. I think with Rachel, she is the most, we'll say public. She's had the most public meltdown for or PR crisis. Let's call it a PR crisis and not make it personal. She's had the most public PR crisis from all of those sort of hashtag Girlboss brands that got built up. Now a lot of them have failed, including the girl who wrote Girlboss. Her brand fell apart as well, but she definitely disappeared because she did have a team and she, her company was ostensibly separate from her, whereas the Hollis brand is, you know, it's Dave and Rachel Hollis, but really it's Rachel Hollis. So when you're looking at this sort of PR crisis from a branding perspective, how do you separate the two? And then secondly, is this something that the company is going to be able to survive being as the two, we'll say tent poles of the brand itself have gone their separate ways.

Right, right, exactly. So let's then focus in on. Now that we know our background and where we're coming at it, I want to discuss, let's talk about how they got there and we're going to sum it up quickly. Let's just do it in snackable pieces, how they got there, why other people maybe won't be able to capture that. And then we're going to focus on the. Where it all fell apart, you know, where the train went off the track. So starting from the beginning, Dave, share with me the environment that allowed the Hollis brand and Rachel in particular to take off and why it was so unusual.

Yeah, so Rachel began as an event planner, but really what it is is Dave worked for Disney. She, he worked for the distribution arm of Disney as one of their head salesmen. I think it was like VP of distribution. And utilizing some of the connections that Dave had, Rachel was able to. I'm just going to go on do not disturb because I'm getting 50 million messages. Rachel was able to leverage that into an event planning business. Now we don't really know what kind of events she put on. Supposedly they were successful and supposedly they were for some fairly famous people. But the thing that kind of sparked her fame was this authentic in air quotes, picture of her on Instagram in a bikini. She's already had kids so, you know, stretch marks and all, which is fairly. On an aspirational platform like Instagram, that was a fairly open thing to do. Now the thing about it is that form of authenticity quickly became plasticine, let's just put it that way. It became something that was manufactured as opposed to the original post, which was supposedly authentic. Rachel is, was at that stage an aspiring writer and her book girl, wash your face came out very shortly afterwards. And part of the marketing for that was, you know, these Instagram platform that she built up. And the thing about it is Rachel's audience began on Instagram, but her the real platform that they use is Pinterest. The language that she uses is all very pin based. It's that pin Pinterest community. The way I describe it might Sound a little bit dismissive, but that's not what I mean at all. But they're sort of Midwest, Southern, white, big hats, long blonde hair. They use Pinterest and they like Etsy. That kind of, that kind of demographic. There's a lot of single moms in there and military spouses and there is a lot of overlap with the MLM community. And so she was able to leverage that audience to sort of build her brand and build the Hollis brand. And then part of that was the podcast, which is how I sort of initially connected with her. I found the Rise podcast and I was like, who is this person? And then read the book and did.

Not like it and did not like it. Here you are talking about why you did not like it. Some other piece of the, of the environment that she was in that, that I've noticed. And with all of the criticism that is levied against these two, it's throughout numerous Facebook groups. Certainly there is a very big and growing subreddit, Hollis Uncensored, that is filled to the brim with former Hollis fans, disenfranchised Hollis fans, who've invested not only years of time and emotion and money into this brand, it's. They feel let down, they feel betrayed. And in my work in PR crisis work, I get that so often with cl, where they have their community, their. Their consumers, their customers strike back. And so often it's from a point of betrayal when people feel betrayed. And certainly that's what's happening with the Hollis brand. But what I don't see as discussed as much, which I'm fixated on, are people like Rachel Hollis and people of her ilk, self help entrepreneur, girl boss, bootstrappy, Tony Robbins esque type people, is so many of them captured their communities, their eyeballs and the revenue at a time when social media was a little bit more the wild West. The algorithms were designed to create community quickly. It wasn't a time where you really had to invest in advertising on social media because I believe that they were just trying to amass as many followers as they could. So so many of these people, Jenna Kutcher would be another name. Amy Porterfield. So Pat Flynn. So many of these people just skyrocketed to the top because they were bolstered really by social media compared to now, when these people are preaching to their minions and to their followers, well, you can do it just like me. Well, they can't because the environment has changed so much. Would you agree with that?

100%. And it comes down to the sheer number of people that are on the platforms these days. If you look at something like Instagram as a platform and just the amount of people that they have, and that audience transitions over to Facebook a little bit too, but less so for the past two years, because Facebook's name brand recognition has really been dragged through the mud since 2017. But Instagram itself, as a separate brand, has just so many people on it that you are competing with that many people. Whereas in 2012, it was the place to be. It was, you know, millennials wanted to be on there. They were, you know, skinny lattes and unicorn hair. Whereas now it's TikTok.

What is unicorn hair?

It's like multicolored hair and, you know, gotcha. Okay, I'm old.

I guess I'm too old for that.

And now you have. Yeah, TikTok, which is completely different. It's a completely different aesthetic. And that authenticity that I mentioned earlier on just doesn't translate to that app.

So, Dave, you just said something that sparked another thought in my mind on all this, because I. I do want to, you know, quickly wrap up this first part by. By discussing why she. She became big in a very manufactured environment that what she was projecting wasn't actually true. But before we get there, I want to point out that where she grew in a Facebook Instagram, Pinterest world, it was TikTok that was the platform that was her downfall.

Yeah. Yeah. And whether that be because it's harder to be that style of authentic on TikTok, we don't know that yet. It's not an old enough brand to be able to see whether that works or not. But the early adopters on TikTok, at least it was very much a case of try everything and then see what sticks. Whereas Instagram is very aesthetic, and it. That is that sort of the esthetic, everything has to be perfect, came from when they purely did images they invented. Well, they didn't invent, but they popularized the filter, they popularized face tuning. All of that sort of that aesthetically pleasing brand that Instagram grew came from the single images. And the early adopters on Instagram, who were photographers and they wanted their stuff to look good on a small screen. There's, like, massive reasons as to why it ended. And it evolved that way. And I could talk about it for hours, but that would pull us away from the Hollis brand.

Yeah, from the Hollis brand, but. So we'll wrap this up. But the other piece of that, that social piece, which could be an entire discussion on its own, almost seems like it Would be an excellent white paper is like the Facebook was the one platform too, where you can really create community. The Instagram. Instagram. Pinterest is putting your brand out there in photographs, as you mentioned. But leveraging Facebook groups is a way to increase your brand and increase your revenue. So when she had her books, for instance, girl, wash your face in her group, she asked people, will you be an influencer of my book and tell people to buy my book? And that Facebook group is almost like a money stream. Like, yeah, open the door and the money comes out there. So it all speaks to this environment where she had the right preparation and hustle with the right timing and with a lot of luck, I think, to explode how she did and why that brand became so big.

Yeah. And she speaks to an audience she knew. One of the ways that you sort of pick your audience is in any marketing campaign is to know where they hang out already. So you want to be where they already are. You're not trying to make a market, you're trying to go where they already are. And so she was able to leverage her knowledge of the audience to know the types of groups that she had to be involved in and to be able to say the right things that would work with that audience. And she certainly was able to do that on Facebook and on Pinterest.

Yes, without a doubt. Without a doubt. Okay, so we've discussed how they got there, how big they got. Eventually, Dave Hollis leaves his job at Disney, the vice president of sales. Let's just talk about that Disney connection for a moment. What Dave Hollis making easily seven figure job. I would say by the time he was leaving, at least with bonuses, they had a lot of income coming in. And his income was propping up her business, which likely didn't make a lot of money in the beginning, which you don't hear about in the narrative.

Yeah, especially before they started. Like when you start a conference, unless you have a corporate sponsor from the get go, it is really expensive. And I imagine her leveraging the media attention that she got to. Instead of having a grassroots movement, it's probably grassroots by, you know, the likes of, say, south by Southwest. There's. She's getting way less numbers than that, but it's still a massive expense to put on these events. It's renting the place. And the thing that really kills you is the insurance, because you need insurance for yourself, for all your employees, for the crowd that's going to be there, because not everybody's going to sign release notes. And so that is going to hurt your bottom line.

Right.

And when you are building a business that is in the event marketing space, you have to either have the sponsorship to be able to pay for that insurance or you're gonna front the money yourself. And I'm unsure because I don't know whether or not Rachel had the sponsors at the beginning, but she certainly was able to leverage those sponsors later on when she attached her brand to the MLM space.

Right? Yes. And speaking to that MLM audience about how to sell and how to hustle, and you own your own business and you can do this if you get up early, if you get up at 4, you can do this. So she had the hustle culture going. She was getting bookings, which is money when you're a keynote and an MLM event. I don't know if you saw the Amazon prime documentary Lulu Row about the Lulu Row.

I haven't seen it, but I've been in groups speaking about it. Other people have told me about it.

Okay. I think you would. I think you would like it. I think you should watch it because it does speak to all this. And there was a glimpse of Rachel on that documentary. But people now are more discerning when it comes to who they're going to spend their money to, who they're going to follow. The last piece before we leave the downfall, I want to talk about one other area that isn't highlighted. I don't see it all, even in these interviews about her, that not only did she leverage social media, she leveraged her husband's income, but she also leveraged her husband's connections by working at Disney. It was a company that owned ABC. When Rachel got her start, as you mentioned, with the tiger stripes Instagram post that these aren't stretch marks or my tiger stripes and I've earned them. That story went viral because she was on gma. Good Morning America. That, to me is a phone call that Dave Hollis made to a booker at GMA and ask, hey, can you put my wife on the show? Every piece of collateral, content that she rolls out, every book. Her first stop, and sometimes her only stop with national media is gma. The average entrepreneur is not going to get a national morning show booking. And so I think that had a huge play in her success.

Definitely. And it speaks to that demographic again, because you know who is watching Good Morning America? It's mothers at home, it's military spouses. It's people who are either not on the way to the office or who are catching it up later in the day, but more than likely, you're watching it in the morning while you're getting. Either your kids have gone off to school and you're sitting down for your coffee, or, you know, you're getting them ready. And that's on in the background.

Yeah. And something I just saw on Hollis uncensored, too, was that she also had a clip. Really? Her first clip was on the Disney Channel with. I'm blanking on the name. I had four kids, and so I lived this Disney Channel. I can't think it was the pirate. It was like JoJo and the Pirates. I can't remember. It wasn't JoJo. That was a clown. But at any rate, I'm conflating my Disney characters. But she was even on a Disney Channel show putting together party supplies. So she was propped up definitely by something. Okay, so, Dave, let's now go from why they were able to build when they built it to what happened? What was the incident that brought it all down.

Yeah. Okay. I can't remember the exact label, but I don't. Toilet gate or toilet gate.

That's it.

Right. So Rachel goes on TikTok and has this rant where she calls out to her haters and says the words, what makes you think there's something about me that tells you I want to be relatable? And in the. In the caption, she's got the likes of Harriet Tubman and. Who else did she have? Malaya. I'm butchering that.

She had Oprah.

Oprah and basically saying. Equating herself to.

Yes. To these iconic women.

Yes. Of the world. And this was over the fact that she is wealthy enough to be able to afford someone to come and, you know, clean her toilets, which.

Right, fine.

If you. If you can afford to do that, that's great. But. But ranting about it on a live. When your audience can't afford to do that, and that's why they're involved in mlms, because it allows you to be a mother. And, you know, that's the sort of. That's how they prey on these people. They are able to sell the dream of, oh, you can have it all, you can be a mom, and you can run your own business. Well, Rachel basically proved with that rant that the only way she's able to have it all is she pays other people to do the things that she doesn't want to do that you can't pay people to do because you don't have the money.

Right, Absolutely. So to build your brand off of relatability and to, you know, I don't want to use the word, but in many cases it felt like milk. A very vulnerable audience. And then to have a rant, as you say, on TikTok, not a platform that she probably felt all too together comfortable with as well. And it showed a very sharp, edgy side to her that she didn't want to portray. It just it made her look. And I don't mean this in an appearance wise, but it was really an ugly TikTok. It just felt ugly.

Yeah.

Naturally it went viral. She deleted it immediately. But it went all over TikTok, which Rachel, I do not think that's where her. Her people did not live. Okay. Her supporters were not there. All the people who were really scrutinizing her were there. This would have been different if this was viral on Instagram or on Facebook. But that essentially was her downfall. And I feel like a good marker of a PR crisis is if the New York Times and Buzzfeed is doing a story about your downfall. Well, one you've made it that they want to talk about you, but also you lost it too. And that's really hard to come back from. So now let's talk about the other end of it. Why do you think it all came apart? I mean, the TikTok video was just kind of triggering probably an inevitable downfall. So what brought it all down?

So I think the divorce definitely played into that. We don't know what was happening in her personal life that caused this to sort of trigger for her. She's definitely had haters online for a long time, especially on YouTube. And you don't have to go far to. You don't have to dig very deep to find someone who is less enamored with Rachel Hollis and just the Hollis brand in general. That sort of toxic positivity, the sheen came off that in. In 2017. And she's been skating along on the backs of the audience that she built. But with the movement of anti MLM that's out there and just general a sort of subculture of anti capitalism and that's been growing since 08. It's that sort of reached fever pitch right now. And they are all on TikTok. And so, yeah, the. The other thing that you need to kind of take into account is the fact that she has all of these stressors. She is running a business. That business is not necessarily doing all that well. Especially pandemic, you know, like conferences are not happening. It's very stressful. Her marriage is falling apart, but at the same time, her Instagram is still, you know, My house in Hawaii. My place in Texas. Oh, I can just go off to Spain for a day. I was just up in Toronto at a Rise conference. Normal people are not seeing that. Right. They're not seeing that as work. And I've said this before, right. I hate traveling for work. It's. It's one of my. It's. Honestly, I hate the airport. It's awful. You get on the plane, you're really uncomfortable. You have to take off your shoes. Well, she never shows any of that, you know, uncomfortable travel nonsense even.

No influencer shows any of that.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

But, you know, she has. Does she have four kids?

Three. She has four kids.

So if you're traveling with kids, even I can't. I don't. I hate the airport, and I have no kids. I can only imagine how stressful it is when you have kids and you never see. You never see anything but the positive from the Hollis brand. And that is not what people are living. And so the sheen came off because there's only so much you can talk about how stressful something is without showing there's a. When you're building a story or you're telling a story, it's always show, don't tell. And it was always tell in the captions how life is, but show this beautiful picture. And so we never got to show any of the hardship that she went through.

That's insightful, Dave, because it was the first time a divorce. You can't spin a divorce as much as you want that it's a positive life event. It's not. And that's a very good point. Their promoting perfection. And also the fact that they had conferences aimed at and targeting these spouses now these women hoping that they would drag their husbands to a marriage conference put on by Rachel and Dave Hollis, two people whose only credential to put on a conference about marriage is the fact that they've done a conference and that there happened to be married. Other than that, there was no other reason. And while they were doing this and charging exorbitant rates, not paying for hotels, there was no other fluff in there. Unless you purchase a VIP ticket. They were get. They. Their marriage was falling apart.

Yeah, exactly. And how, first of all, they shouldn't have been running a conference in the first place. Like, they have no credentials whatsoever. And I think they were able to build that first off, because they put on a conference that was about, you know, business. Pull yourself up from your bootstraps. We understand you. God is great. That kind of. That kind of mentality. And then secondly, their podcast that they had together was very much this is how we communicate. It's so important to us giving advice that they weren't following themselves. And I think that that is where the audience lost them. Like they had die hard fans and they lost their die hard fans because people don't like being lied to. And their entire brand was lying to people. Like Dave and Rachel together was just lying to people. So yeah, I think when you're talking about it from a brand, I think Rachel has a way out and we can talk about Dave. I think he's a. He has a. A whole section to this story that we haven't even touched on.

Exactly. And I think he's a great place where we can steer his ship. Is that a book that you read? Did you read his latest book?

No. Did anyone buy that book?

Oh my gosh. So many things wrong with that book. I did not read that book. But the worst part of the book was the two hour Instagram livestream, which I'll add a link to it in the show notes. I mean it's, it's something to behold. And watching it and I have. It was on a Saturday and it happened to pop up on my phone and I watched it a few times and I remember I had a lot, I accomplished a lot in those two hours. And every time I look at my phone, he would still pop up there. But what you sadly watched was the manic downfall of a man struggling through just loss. And it was loss of identity, loss of brand, loss of his wife, loss of control and learning too, that his. It also he lost the opportunity to be a big time player. I think what set him down that spiral is he was anticipating to have a big publicity rollout. He was supposed to be on Dave, what morning talk show.

Oh, Good Morning America.

And it got cut.

Yeah.

And that I think from watching the stories. Cause of course I was fascinated by this was when he took his turn and it was a point of no recovery from him. And that's where he is right now. I think he's in an unrecoverable place. But what do you think?

I think so. And I think part of this is that Rachel wanted to be the celebrity, whereas Dave was an executive. And Dave taking on some of these roles that he took on. I don't think he was ever as comfortable with it as Rachel is. And even you watch Rachel today, she's still charismatic. I don't particularly like the message that she has. I think it's toxic.

It's a pivot, but it's a pivot.

It's charismatic. I like the way she interacts with people when she tells a story. It's really interesting. She has a good presence about her. And I think that Dave just never had that. And when he came on with this sort of, when he came on with the Hollis brand instead of just the name and the money, I think he wanted to have a little piece of that and he was just never going to be that person. And even when you watch or listen to old interviews where. Or podcasts of them together, he interrupts a lot. For someone who, like when you listen to the two of them together, she's telling a story and he'll cut in and try and speak over her, but nobody speaks over Rachel. So.

So like he's just baby in a coder and no one speaks over Rachel.

But like it's almost hard to watch because he is awkward with that. But he probably thought, you know what, I could be a Tony Robbins. No, Dave, you can't, you know.

Right. So there's only one Tony Robbins, unfortunately. That's how I feel. That's how I feel about Tony Robbins and the whole lot of them. Yeah. So Dave Hollis, though I do think he had a bump certainly after the divorce, I called it wrong. I thought that he left her. I thought his ego, he got caught up in his ego and you know, when he was on the stage at Rise and all these people were following him and I just think he just, he love. So he went from being a successful salesperson, he strong armed, we think his way into the CEO position at Hollisco without really management experience. I mean, he was a salesperson, but he was never a CEO. He's never run a company. And that company for the millions of dollars it brought in to speak to what you mentioned in the beginning, it takes a lot of money to run a company like that. When you're, when you're doing shows, when you're doing conferences, when you, as you pointed out, you need to get insurance. They have employees. They probably had a lot of contracted employees working for them. But they were a small business. They applied for a PPP loan and it was a big one. I think they got over a million dollars to help float that. But you had an interesting take on the money. I'm always interested in the money too. I think how much money is. How much Hollis money is truly left. And I like your point of where you think the money went.

Yeah. So I think when it comes to personal money, I think a Lot of that is tied up in the company. So Rachel, we know she has multiple properties, but we don't know how leveraged she is on those properties. We don't know what loans she has. We don't really know, because it's still a private company, what sort of leverage the Hollis Co has as well. And how is that going to be affected by the divorce, like, who owns what.

Right.

The other thing is Rachel can come online and say, oh, I know what it's like to struggle to be a business owner because we're so much in the red and, you know, it's hard to pay for all these bills. But that's not really what we're seeing online either. We don't see her struggle with that. And she doesn't talk about it from the perspective of a business owner. She talks about it from the perspective of someone who is a homeowner who struggles with money, which are two separate things. You can't equate the two together. They link. But your business should be separate from your home. Like, the two bills should be separate. And when you talk about the Rise Conference, while Rachel is the brand owner of the Rise Conference, they are two separate companies. So Rachel has her stuff that she gets, that she speaks and she gets paid for. And then there's the Rise Company or the Rise Conference, and that is a separate entity. I wonder how much of Rachel's own money went into floating those conferences and making sure they're paid. And then, you know, how many sponsors pulled out and how many contracts was she not able to get out of over the pandemic? Because, yeah, we know conference centers that I think there was four months where they were like, okay, we. We won't expect payment. But, you know, after 90 days, the banks start coming for them. They start coming for their customers. And no amount of PPP loan is going to save you for two. For two years of no conferences. Right. Like, it's. It's just. It's so many of these event marketing places have failed because of it.

Yeah, that. But that's interesting. Your take on that, though, is where they split the money, which is why Rachel has money now and she can go to Hawaii. And she seems very comfortable and Dave seems very comfortable, but maybe the business itself has no money and that's why they're laying people off and no one's really working for them. Maybe the two of them are the ones left with the money and there really isn't much of a business.

That's. And how much of a business is there Without Rachel there. Would, Would the Rise Conference happen without Rachel? I don't think so.

Yeah, I don't.

She's, yeah, she's the face, she's the face of the brand in the same way Disney used to be. But unfortunately she doesn't have a cute caricature that can take over for her.

Right.

And that, that the cuteness certainly came off in that Instagram or the TikTok video that she gave.

TikTok. Yes, certainly.

Yeah, it's. I'd be interested to see if, and I'm not saying I want it leaked or anything, but if it was ever leaked, I'd be interested in seeing what the business fundamentals for Hollisco actually was because.

Oh, without a doubt, it's.

I can't imagine they were not severely in the red. And how much were they paying themselves, Right. As owners and executives at these companies? Because we don't know that either. They were getting money from public speaking and the book sales and media appearances. How much money were they paying themselves thanks to the conferences? Because that is one of the, it's just one of the things we don't hear about and we never will because as much as Rachel said she doesn't want to be relatable, her brand was built on relatability.

Absolutely, absolutely. So that's an interesting take. So I'm now going to look at it a different way. That the business itself was probably struggling, needed the loan. That's why they laid off so many people. Why people I saw in the subreddit Hollis uncensored subreddit, that people who are working with her right now are in the process of looking for jobs. So Dave, what do we think? Last question before I'm going to ask you that one indestructible PR tip. What is in store for Rachel Hollis? What's in store for Dave Hollis? What's in store just for this idea of the self help guru praying off of these communities in a social media sense. What's next?

So I think Rachel's audience has definitely changed. She's gone anti mlm and we saw that in her last book, which was another hit that she took because after speaking at so many MLMs and that audience being a big part of her core audience when she released, didn't see that coming and she basically lambasted that business model. That audience sort of fell apart and they're a big part of that Reddit chain as well. I think she may survive if she attaches herself to another audience, but she has to move away from her core that her traditional core and she has to latch onto something else. The one that she's going for at the moment, this hippie, dippy sort of moon goddess. Everybody have crystals. They're not the ones. They're not paying to go to conferences. So as much as I think that that's helpful for her post divorce, for her business, she's gonna have to find some other way to navigate that. I think Dave is done. And I think the only audience that's left for him is crossover with Joe Rogan's audience, let's put it that way. There's. There's the. He could go. And he doesn't have the acumen for it, I don't think, but he could go full Jordan Peterson, but. Oh, you.

Well, you know what? There are undertones. I mean, for people who spend time on the social. And then the subreddit, very anti. You know, Covid didn't exist. Masks. What. There is definitely a conservative feel to the lifestyle of Dave and Rachel. I don't know about Rachel, but definitely Dave and his girlfriend Heidi. So that is interesting. And he always tries to creep in the Christianity piece of it, but, yeah, maybe go the conservative route. It's a way to build a base quickly.

Yeah, exactly. If he can grab that sort of maga, for want of a better word, he would be able to at least leverage that. This is white anger, that white male anger, that. That would allow him to survive. But it's whether or not he has the acumen to see that as well as, you know, if they'll be. If he's accepted that way. And in fairness, there's enough history of emotional abuse out there about Dave that I think I wouldn't. I wouldn't see that as an unexpected possibility.

Interesting. Okay, well, we shall see. Even though he is in social media hibernation, which means he doesn't post on his own Instagram account, but he does pop up in his girlfriend Heidi's account a lot. It will be interesting to see what his next step is. I definitely think even though he had that Instagram post indicating he was taking a break for his health and all the right things to say, when in truth, I think he's just hiding. He's hiding from a conference, a failed conference that he could not blame Covid on because of what you talked about. And also he's just not ready to pop up yet because he doesn't know who the new Dave is going to be. But Dave, you. I like Dave Irwin. It's an outlier, to be sure, but it could be.

Yeah.

Certainly see it.

So it's the only way that I can see him surviving. At least he. He won't have the same audience because his audience was only there because of Rachel.

Right.

He was the. You know, when you go into a store with. Or your, you know, your partner comes into the store with you and you're looking at clothes or something and he's sitting on the chair. You know, like they give a chair for the husbands. They call it the lost husband corner. Stop. Like, that's where he was. That's what his audience was with Rachel's. Like it was. The husbands were dragged in and maybe they'd listen.

Right.

But it was mostly just, sure, I'll do this with you, honey. Okay. There's someone I can relate to there.

Right.

And you mentioned it earlier as well. You know, wives who drag their husbands to these conferences. I think that the only way to sort of leverage an audience at all, because he's not going back to being an executive at a sale, like, as a sales.

I don't know who would. Yeah.

I don't know.

Unless he takes a significant step down.

And whether he even has that anymore is another thing. Like, does he have the ability to. Especially after the fame that he had, you know, being on stage and getting that adoration, even if it was misplaced. And then the kind of. The final thing that I would say is Rachel is still charismatic, but Dave is not. And that was definitely shown in his two hour Instagram Live. Right. Like, without Rachel, what is he? And that certainly comes across because even before he took his break, he wouldn't shut up talking about her.

You're right. That's a very good point. He is not an engaging speaker who draws you in. The word that often gets told about him is he puts out a lot of word salad.

Yeah.

He speaks, but makes no sense whatsoever. Just tosses in and shakes it. He has a good timber to his voice, but it's empty. There's nothing that he says. That's a very good point. He's not. He doesn't have that evangelical.

And there's other people out there that. That have that. There's Jay Shetty. He wrote Think like a Monk. If you want to go positive masculinity, you can go it like. And that hustle culture. You've got your Gary Vee's and your Tony Robbins, and he just doesn't have the presence.

Like, he doesn't.

You know, Gary has his F bombs and his.

He's a brand. Yeah, he's a brand.

And Dave just doesn't have any of that. Which is surprising because I think as far as sales and sort of sales process, Dave is probably way more, if you want to say authoritative. If he could even leverage any of that or that was how to been part of his brand before he would have been able to go there. But he just doesn't have it.

So he doesn't have it. Okay, great. End note. Last thing, with every podcast I always ask a guest or I always include one indestructible PR tip. I'm in the business of helping people create brands that cannot fall apart. Like the Hollis brand. You know what Dave, what could you share imparted from this discussion about the Hollis's about branding, selling yourself, your reputation in that online influencer entrepreneur space?

Yeah, one thing I always say is a personal brand is a privilege and not everybody get. Everyone gets to have one. You're working your job, you're raising your kids, you've probably got a side hustle. You don't need the added pressure of also trying to build this online presence as well. Your brand is built when you deliver on your promises. So focus on delivering on your promises. Try and document it when you can and your brand will build by itself. But don't spend too much time online trying to build something that Rachel and Dave had because we've just seen it all come crashing down.

Build your business, not your brand. Or the brand will come. Build your business and the brand will come. Dave Irwin. Where can people find out more about you and your business?

Oh yeah, I'm online. Dave gets social pretty much everywhere and then you can find me. I blog on my website. David irwindesign.com yeah, fabulous.

And of course you pop in on Twitter Space's PR lunch hour every Friday with me. Or we try to do it every Friday. They're certainly there to carry on the conversation. Hey Dave, thank you so much for taking this little slight deviation in your job and mine too. Just to put under the microscope this brand, this Hollis brand and why they were a million dollar brand that fell apart and it was just some basic business practices. So thank you so much for breaking that down everyone.

Thank you very much for having me. I'm grateful that I can look at the fallout of what it amounts to self help gurus that I don't really have a lot of respect for from a business acumen perspective because it gives me a reason now to actually look at it as opposed to to just Schadenfreude.

Right, exactly. That's why I'm there.

All right.

Well, thanks so much, Dave. I appreciate it.

Thank you very much.

My thanks to Dave Irwin for joining me on this podcast slash livestream YouTube video. That's all for this week on the podcast. Thanks for listening. If you want to watch the video version of the interview, you can head on over to my YouTube channel. There is a link in the show.

Notes if you want to.

If you want more information on Dave Irwin, you can follow him across social media at Dave Getsocial or you can head over to his website, Daveerwind Design.com thanks so much for listening. Bye for now.