The Strength Of A Personal Brand

If we're going to accept, and I do believe it's true. If you're an entrepreneur, one of the most valuable things you can do for yourself and for your business today, but for future businesses later on is to have a personal founder brand. Like to build your own audience and to build your own following that can be directed at the business. The business also builds its own. Yeah, you get both.

How much more successful would you be if you had lunch once a week with insanely successful entrepreneurs who share their biggest secrets on how they think and achieve success? Grab your seat at the table because this is Business Lunch with Roland Frazier and Ryan Deiss. Welcome to another episode of Business Lunch and today's a Snackable Episode with Roland where he's going to get into some more tactical strategies that you can start using to live a rich and happy life. If this is the first snackable episode you're hearing, I'd encourage you to go back and listen to some of the other episodes that Roland has put out. And if you want to get notified every time we release a new episode, go go to the new businesslunchpodcast.com website and we'll send you detailed notes along with every episode. That's businesslunchpodcast.com www.businesslunchpodcast.com and you can sign up for the free email newsletter where you'll be able to get all the highlights and resources from the episodes.

Hey everybody. Welcome to Business Lunch with Ryan Deiss, who is on your screen and the person whose lips are not moving right now.

And me, Roland Frazier.

And if you're listening to this, you don't even know who's who, but I'm me and he's him. Ryan, how you doing today?

I'm doing really, I'm doing really great. I don't know how to come back from that. That was amazing. That was a beautiful introduction. I'm excited to be here with you. What the heck are we talking about?

Well, actually we were chatting about the possibility of. Well, actually we were talking about personal brands for founders and entrepreneurs and I love the topic. What are your thoughts on that?

So I've evolved on this issue, as they say. I push back so hard on this topic. For so many years I was a personal and I guess still am had a personal brand on the Internet, very well known through Digital marketer and traffic and Conversion Summit and I never liked it. I truly believe there are some people who want to be famous and there are some people who want to be rich and there's some people who want both. I'm only in this for the money. I will say that I am not in this for any degree of fame. I don't particularly enjoy it. It's not my favorite thing. And so I always saw.

I want to correct before you guys think that Ryan is an evil money grubbing genius. He does. Also, you like to give back, you like to share, and you like to teach, right? So I do. So like that component of what you do, you enjoy quite a bit, but the same you could do without.

Yes, yes. Yeah, that saying, I'm only in it for the money is hyperbole, but yes, I think.

Thank you.

But I always thought as a necessary evil and something that I would do only as long as I had to. And I remember it had to have been at least going on 10 years now. I was having. I had dinner, just me and him, with Gary Vaynerchuk. I was up in New York and we were grabbing dinner, kind of circumstances aligned, just the two of us, and we were talking about this whole thing and I was like, man, why do you do it? Because it seemed like it sucks. And he basically was like, I love it. I was like, okay, I get why you do it. And he's like. And I was like, I don't. And I'm, you know, I'm trying to figure out how to not. And he told me, he said. He said, I think that's really stupid. And he actually said, I think it's effing stupid if, you know Gary, he's like, I think it's effing stupid. Like you shouldn't do. I was like, really? He's like, yeah, yeah. He's like, I will. I will always have it. I think it's important. I think you're doing it anyway. And I think if you, if you ever stop, you're going to regret it. And like any arrogant idiot, I, you know, promptly listen to that advice, said thank you, and ignored it. And it's because, you know, for me, when I thought about the notion of a personal brand, I thought, this is something that is unsellable. This is something that keeps you trapped. This is something that only those people who have to do it do. And the actual, you know, people with real wealth who have built real companies and real brands, they don't have to mess with doing this unless they just want to. And that's because they want fame and I don't. And I, And I think I approached it from a. From a very arrogant, egotistical point of view, like, oh, I don't have to do that. And so I'm not going to do that. What I have come to realize and I've come to evolve on this issue is that Gary was right and I was completely stupid. And I'm now in the process of looking to kind of actively rebuild and relaunch a personal brand at the similar time where. Love for you to speak to this because you definitely enjoyed being the man behind the scenes, being the person that nobody really knew who they were. And you would come out and you'd do some talks and everybody's like, who is that masked man? And then you'd go back behind, you know, things like you'll never see him again. Haha. But, but obviously over the last couple of years you've really made an effort, this podcast notwithstanding your social following, books and whatnot, to build your up your own personal brand. So I feel like we were sort of aligned and then without talking to me, you sort of like decided that you were going to go and build this personal brand. And you know, you making that decision definitely was one of the things that helped me evolve. So I'm just curious, like I'm happy to speak to what I feel about it now. I want to give the context to where I was. But where do you stand on this?

Yeah, so I'm same. Same place that, that you stood and same evolution is. I always, I liked being the person behind the scenes. I, I like you. I like the rich part. Don't care about the fame part. I also like to teach and, and impact. But I had found that you could do that from behind the scenes just fine. But what I saw was I saw a lot of, a lot of people leveraging audiences into deals and because I'm a deal person and, and that's near and dear to my heart. And also I was watching people that were way, way younger than me hitting the billion dollar mark in shockingly fast time and they didn't do fairness.

Some of them had sex tapes. And to my knowledge, you don't.

To your knowledge?

Yeah.

Yes. No, I don't. But the, the thing is, is that that what I, what I watched him doing was that, that I saw that, that it was audience and I first saw it with like, okay, well, they're billionaires because they've invented some amazing thing and I'm not going to invent Facebook, which still pisses me off, just to be clear that I did not do that. I didn't. And, and so I was mad about that, but I was okay with it because I'm like, you know, well, that's a unicorn hacker crazy, you know, Harvard, you know, there's got to be some Van Winkle walls and some other people in there. But that's okay, I can live with myself. But then I watch significantly younger people hitting this and they're doing it through this whole being an influencer thing, which I'm like, just think is the most ridiculous thing ever, that people are famous for being famous. And so I just, I didn't understand it, but I truly didn't get the value of it that Gary clearly got way before you or I did. And what I saw was that if I was that like, part of what I didn't like about it too was creating content, but that if I wanted to get to where I wanted to get, I needed to not be just in deals. I needed to get deals and to have the best deal flow. I could advertise or I could create content that was interesting to people. And honestly, between those two, I way prefer creating content. I didn't like the idea that you create content and then it's very ephemeral, it goes away and then nobody sees it again. But what doesn't go away is the audience that you're building. And so that, that you're. The asset isn't your content base. The asset is the audience. And the audience is very monetizable. And you have a responsibility to them to do that in a fair and good way and give them value. And when you do, they will reward you. Now, when you command an audience, even if it's a small one like you and I have, it's still quite valuable. And there are people that would like to have access to it and they will then do deals with you. And so without being Kylie Jenner or, or George Clooney or the Rock or all these other people that you see doing deals with with companies because they have an audience, you can still effectively get that same benefit because there will be people who want to have access to the audience that you have. And if you're building and growing that audience, that will only increase with time. And as long as you treat that audience well, that asset will be there and grow and grow and grow. And so even though you're doing different deals and even though your content is short lived and goes away very often, then you still are building that asset. And it took me a really long time to get that. It seems to me incredibly simple at this point. But you know, I'm, I'm a slow learner, I guess, or, or just you know, I didn't want to do it, but having realized that if I was going to get what I wanted to get within the time I wanted to get, I was going to have to build an audience. And at that point it was okay, I'm leaning in all the way. And then it's been a crazy four year journey or so I guess at this point of, of how do I do this? Because holy goodness, it's a lot of work to, you know, even for us doing this podcast, it's a lot of work to do something consistently once a week for years, but that's really what it takes to, to make it happen. So. So, like I was completely on the same page with you and then just saw that I'm, I am not less smart or less good or less valuable than the people that I see monetizing their personal brand into the things that I would like to do. And so I've got to have, I've got to do those things too. That's kind of the evolution. So where are you? Any comments on that? And then where are you now?

So I think the biggest breakthrough for me happened and maybe this is going to be beneficial for, for other people who feel like, like we both did. There's a difference between saying, I have, let's call it a personal brand for lack of a, for lack of a better term, and I have a business where I am the product.

Yeah, agree.

And I think, I think I struggled separating those two in my own head. Yeah, Right. And so I'll say it another way. If your company is you. Right. And this could be, maybe you've got a guru business. Yeah, Right. You look at somebody like a Tony Robbins, right. Where they are their business and their business is them. If there's no Tony on stage, there's probably nobody coming out to that, to that event. And there's lots of people that are like this, where they are their business and their, and their business is them. And there's lots of people where that's the only business they have. Yeah, Right. And there have been these people. This is nothing new. They have lived, they have died, and their business has died with them. And I never wanted that. And so I was very intentional when we were building digital marketer.com even though I was the early face of the company, even though I was a, like to think a pretty good marketer in my own right, I never wanted digital marketer to be the Ryan Dice guru business.

Yeah.

So I actively tried to bring on other people, but I thought that I then, as A personal brand almost needed to die to not do that. Not the case. But I think, by the way, you may say, like ab, I'm not Tony Robbins, I don't have a guru business. The same thing happens in professional services all the time with, you know, attorneys and folks where they are the business and the business is them. And so I always conflated if I have a personal business, I mean, if. I'm sorry, if I have a personal brand, then I'm trapped and it can never be sold. Yeah, but that's not the model, right? If you have a personal brand, sure, it's a business, but it is a media company with the most efficient type of media that has ever existed, which is fame. Yeah, I mean, fame is the most efficient type of media there is. You are producing. It is this like self generating perpetual motion media machine. And it can be pointed wherever you want to point it. It is a spotlight to be shined upon other businesses. And I think if you look at, like you said, George Clooney, if you look at Ryan Reynolds, if you look at the Rock, these are people who definitely have their own personal media brands. But where they build value, where they build equity, where they've had their biggest successes is not with them as the quote unquote media company, it's with the brands. And so when I realized that, okay, I don't have to be a guru and I don't have to attach myself to this business, and tactically speaking, I think the biggest realization that I had was I can have an email list that isn't associated with one of my companies. Like people could just subscribe to hear from me. I never actually thought about that before. I know that sounds ridiculous. I can launch a YouTube channel where I'm not just creating content for one of our companies. I could have my own. Again, that thought never really. And I know even saying it out loud, this sounds stupid and I realize that, but I also don't think I'm the only one who's making this logical, you know, fallacy. And so just the realization like, oh, wait, and this is what Gary was telling me. You can have both. You can have both. And if, and if you decide to sell a company, the company sells. And if you decide one day to retire from media and fame, you can do that, you'll still own your businesses or you won't because you sold them, but you can have both. And I think that was the realization and the breakthrough that I know that I had and that now I'm stepping out to make that Happen. So I would love to maybe shift. Anything else you want to say on that is cool. But what I would love to hear from you is if we're going to accept, and I do believe it's true, if you're an entrepreneur, one of the most valuable things you can do for yourself and for your business today, but for future businesses later on, is to have a personal founder brand. Like to build your own audience and to build your own following that can be directed at the business. The business also builds its own. Yeah, you get both. You get both. So if we're going to say that, like, let's just acknowledge that it's a good idea. My question to you would be, what are the things that you believe need to be in place? What are the assets, the channels that you think you should tap into as a, as a founder? And maybe is there a sequence to these things? What do you think?

Yeah, I think it's a great question. And I think the other thing that you and I both didn't and continue to not like about personal brand building is that when you stop with the content, it pretty quickly goes away. Like, if you're not top of mind, there's a lot of other people that want to be top of mind that will immediately fill the void of the content that you're no longer making in the lives of all the people that are following you and you will fade fast. That's, that's true of very famous people and it's definitely true of people like us.

That's Hollywood. Yeah, show business, baby.

Yeah, it really is. So, but, so it's, what can you get out of it while you're doing it? So you have to understand that in terms of the, the, the sequence or the, or the things. I think the very first thing is you have to have some experience that you have had or experience that you can create for the audience that is different from what other people do to, to have any kind of significant impact. And a lot of people, it's like when I used to, to go to investment advisors and you're having conversation with them and it's, you know, a guy that's, you know, 21 years old or a gal that's, you know, just gotten out of her MBA program and they're going to tell you how to invest your money. And I'm like, but what do you, how's your net worth looking? You know, oh, well, I'm just getting started, blah, blah, blah. Okay, so you want me to give you a whole bunch of money to manage because you work for the. Okay. No, I don't like it.

Yes, dummy. That's how I build my net worth. Right? Yeah.

From the mistake. Yes. Yeah. So. So. So that's a challenge. Like if you're. If you don't have experience and success and a proven track record in something, or you cannot create a unique and entertaining experience for people, then I probably would think about getting that in place before you start because you can say, well, Mr. Beast, you know, he didn't have any experience going in, but he did. He just started making videos and he really made it a study. And then he created a little mastermind with some other people that were making videos and they shared all their learnings. And he creates very unique experiences that even though he might not have been a seasoned business person, as he was doing this, he captured the attention of the audience. And then you get people that. That do have business experience that can go. And maybe they do a TED Talk or something like that, and they find that that resonates people with people and they're sharing that experience. And then people want to have. I think, who's the guy? Simon Sinek. Right. You know, it's. He's famous because he came up with a really unique way at looking at something that was pretty common. It was, you know, find your why was not revolutionary. But making that your, you know, tying your brand to that and that experience that he was able to create for people, I think that that was significant. So one of those, to me is the starting point then having. Having that or just don't. Don't try to talk about something you don't know anything about that you don't have experience. And don't sell other people's experience that you're curating unless you decide you want to be a subject matter curator like Matt Wolf, who you and I both know who's in a mastermind with us, decided to go all in on AI had had a challenge with lots of things, was kind of trying to find his niche. Now he's got, I think, about a half a million people on a YouTube channel that's grown in just about 18 months in the AI space because he found something that he could curate. And he's basically a news guy, right? He's like, here's the new things and here's how you can use them. And people find that interesting and valuable, and he should be able to monetize that really well. Then it comes down to that. That content Beast. And so I've heard a million people talk about it a million different ways. I think that starting with a platform to get started, whatever is easiest for you, whether it's. I mean, I guess I would lean harder into the category that your people are probably going to be hanging out at, if you can identify that. But then, you know, if you're after business people, LinkedIn is a good place to build. If you are, you know, in other areas like newsletters, podcasts and blogs, and. And then all of the social, particularly social video. And then they're short form and long form if you're going to go, you know, to more of a TikTok kind of thing or YouTube thing. But I think just getting started when you're doing it yourself, that this, like, my journey has been, I don't know what the heck to do. I know I need to create content. Bought podcast stuff three different times, sold it as it gathered dust in the corner. Finally was like, okay, I'm going to do this.

And.

And I did that after doing Facebook. And Facebook was, as you probably remember, just taking my video. And how business lunch actually got started was at lunch, I had lunch with people that were interesting all the time in my, you know, in my world, we'd have good conversations. And one lunch, I just happened to pull out my phone at the end of a conversation that we had. I had taken a couple of notes. There were three things. I was like, would you guys mind if I recorded something? Basically, I handed them my iPhone, hit record, handed it to them, had them pointed at me, and then I said, you know, I was talking with Ryan about this really cool thing, and we talked about this. I'm going to take the phone from Ryan now, and now I'm going to ask him some questions. And then I would take it, turn it around, and it was terrible and unfortunately unusable for anything else because it was so bad. The video quality and the, you know, this was several iPhones ago. And. But I did that and started doing it regularly and then. And then to increase my audience, identified my ideal audience on Facebook and ran boosts myself. Even though that was the stupidest way to advertise on Facebook, it was the way that I actually could do it. And there was no friction because I didn't need an editor. I didn't need somebody following me around. I didn't have to spend a lot of money to do it. I literally already had an iPhone. I didn't have any lav microphones. I didn't have anything that could go wrong other than I forgot to press record. Yes, I did forget a couple of Times, but that like, like whatever gets you started. To me, that's, that's the thing in the most friction free method that you can. Then I tried to learn more about it and found that I failed miserably because I couldn't produce content consistently across multiple platforms because I didn't have time. And so I would try my hand at YouTube and then stop and try my hand, and then that just destroys your growth. You've got to be like regular, regular, regular with whatever you're going to do. So then I started doing the podcast. I basically hired my son to run the podcast stuff. And so that gave me the ability to have somebody else that was doing it that would then upload the stuff and then gradually over time have added people. I went through the whole phase of having one person that runs your content. And so I would hire an agency and they were supposed to do everything. Terrible way to go. Content did not grow at all in any kind of meaningful way for the longest time while I was paying as much as ten grand a month to have people doing it. And then I realized that it's really, you have to have people who live in each of the forms of content. Your podcast person ultimately is, you're going to go all in. You can't have one person running content. It's got to be somebody that lives in and specializes in podcasts, somebody that lives and specializes in newsletters, somebody that lives and specializes in TikTok, somebody that lives and specializes in YouTube. Long form and short form. Different things, my friends, you know, like, and that is where we are now. And that's expensive, but I'm watching it grow faster and faster and it is monetizing and paying for itself because I'm getting more and more people that are coming to me talking about, can we do a deal? Can we? You know, so that I think is. Is. That's a very long explanation, so I'll shut up. But like, that, that's been kind of my journey from, you know, I just can't do this to. I think I've got a decent machine now. And, and it is ramping up pretty rapidly now that I've, you know, gotten to that point of being able to make that investment.

Yeah, I do it all the time, though. Yeah. And, and I think that's, I think if you're gonna do this, if you're gonna have a founder brand, you need to pick a path. And I think there are two. And I think the two paths are you're either always there or you're missed. When you're gone. You either need to. I'm gonna commit to. I'm always gonna be there. Where do you mean by there? Freaking everywhere. Everywhere. Where they are. And so I'm gonna start with one channel like you said. But my strategy is to scale out to all the different channels. If you look at Gary Vaynerchuk, if you look at Grant Cardone, if you look at Alex Harmona, I mean, you look at anybody who's kind of anybody who's considered to have a founder brand, and that's the path that they chose. And I. And it's the. And it's the path that, you know, you've largely followed as well.

But.

But you need to know if that's the path that you choose. Yeah. What it looks like is to your point, step one, have something to say, have a unique perspective, which is going to require that you actually did something. If you're an entrepreneur, if you're a founder, if you're building something, you got something to talk about. Yeah, right. You're building something, you got something, you're actively serving people. You're going to be a subject matter expert or you're not, your business isn't going to grow. So probably a check on that one. And then, you know, I love what you said about you've got to just start putting stuff out there. And this was the mistake that I made is I want everything to essentially be published in its physical, in its final form. And this is like an old school idea. It's how book publishing worked. It's how movies were, you know, were filmed. You didn't see the finished product until it was the finished product. Yeah. You didn't see anything while it's being made. It's not how content happens anymore. Yeah, I struggle with that. So you got to put out things to figure out what are the ideas that are starting to catch. It's way more of the comic that goes and tours and all the small clubs to figure out the jokes that are funny before they do the HBO special.

Yeah.

Then you can begin to package up your core ideas into, you know, into more comprehensive, complete assets. Whether it is YouTube shows, whether it is a podcast, whether it is a book, and there's varying degrees of that. But I do think that that strategy, you know, still holds. But there is the other side that I think is also a viable strategy that I've seen other founders do, which is the. I want to publish regularly, but not as frequently. But I want it to be so good that when I am not published, I'm missed. And I think that is the standard. And if you're going to do that, I think it starts off looking really similar. You know, same thing. You got to have some chops, you got to put out and drip out some messages. But then once you're sort of clear on, okay, this is what I have to say now. I think you might want to shift into. I'm going to publish, you know, you might publish a newsletter once a week or a YouTube show once a week, and maybe that's it. Maybe do a podcast episode, you know, once a week. But I, you know, and maybe eventually you. You write a book, and this. This book becomes an artifact that, that people want. But I truly think there's only. There's only two paths. You're either always there or everywhere, or you're there consistently but not frequently. And when you're gone, you're missed.

But frequently. For the algorithm, it's still once a week. You know, it's to be any less than that. And I'll tell you guys, like, if you haven't done this, man, once a week comes along, it seems every day it's.

Yeah, yeah. You think it's every seven days. And the calendar would suggest that it's every seven days, but that's not true. Yeah. Every other freaking day you're thinking about it. I think the only, the only other way that you could get around it is if you have an email newsletter. Yeah. Because that's not as impacted by. But. But still, if you're going to publish an email newsletter less than once a week, what's the point? Yeah. Yeah. So I think at a minimum, the decision to have a personal brand, a founder brand, is. Is a decision to show up at least once a week. Yeah. And then the only other decision you're going to make is, I'm not going to show up all day every day or just once a week.

And then it gets to kind of the content. I got this from Kris Krohn, and it really has been helpful, is that you need to dedicate a day to content. So, like, I dedicate a day a week to that. It doesn't always work out. Our podcast, we're recording this, I think, on a Wednesday. I think today's Wednesday versus a Monday. We usually record on Mondays, but this Monday was a holiday, so we, you know, we. We adjusted it. But having a commitment in your calendar that you've got a day when you're going to knock out content, like next Monday, I've got three hours in the morning to knock out 30 videos with our video shorts, people. And, and Monday's the day that I try to do that because Monday I'm usually in town in the studio and can do that. And the studios in my house, by the way, as I think yours is. You've got them both, I think at the office in your house, right?

Yeah, yeah.

And, but, but that, that blocked time when you're going to create content can really produce a ton of content. Because if like, if I just did a long form YouTube and this podcast, we could cut up all the YouTube stuff and have all kinds of shorts and all that we're going to, again, like I said, all in. So we have shorts that are generated based on data that comes back from the people that research that say these are the things the algorithm wants. So then we shoot 30 of those in a three hour period and then that's a month's worth of content and then they'll go back to my old content and choose another 30. So that gives me 60 pieces of content to go out, which is two a day that can go out as short form video across all the platforms. And I've got people that edit that and do that. And that only takes me three hours. Even though it's three hours, you know, that's, that's three hours a month by the way, to have that content. Then Ryan and I do this podcast. We shot two today. We'll do that. I'd say we average every other week. Ryan, would that be a fair. Would you say.

I feel like we've gotten to every 1.5.

Okay, all right, that's fair. So every 1.5 weeks we do that and then.

Which is a massive. Proven over the first half of the year.

Then the longer form YouTube stuff is, is being added in. So I'll, I'll effectively have, I think I'll effectively have really like on all that content maybe two full days a month and then I'm recording other content for other stuff we're doing. But that's not really the social stuff. So. So it's not really a lot to put out a ridiculous amount of content if you want. It's just you've got to be very committed to, you know, to doing it regularly.

Yeah, I've got a buddy, he puts out, I think it's like 70 some pieces of content across all channels a day, but it's across like five or six different channels. And he. It is two full days a month, but it's like 12 hour days and it is incredibly well planned. It's incredibly, you know, well orchestrated. There's, you know, a dozen people that are there involved in the filming process and yeah, and I'm going to, you know, I have not decided this. I'm going to give myself permission to change my mind later as I often do. I'm going to see what can happen if I try to do the less frequently but be missed.

Oh, I like it.

And just see like what, what type of traction do we have? Because I've done that before and granted at the time when it was easier to do that, but you know, I remember when I was publishing a regular newsletter and it was actually me writing it. If I was late, I was getting people going like, where's the newsletter? I haven't gotten my email yet. When was the last time you were annoyed that you had not received an email in your inbox? Right. I think there's power to being missed and I think the strongest brands aren't always there. Yeah. But you miss them when they're gone. And, and I think what that forces you to do is to make sure that every single time you do show up, it's damn good. Like it's got to be really, really, really good. So that's, that's the path that I think I'm going to, I'm going to pick. And again, it could fail miserably. That's the nice thing about, you know, doing business launch. We talk about these things. They've been archived. We can check back and see how we did where we changed our mind. But I think that's the strategy that I'm going to be adopting.

I like it. I like it. So whatever works for you guys. Have a personal brand or don't. I think that it will behoove you to have one. It'll definitely help. And then it's just kind of getting into your rhythm for content and picking a channel and starting to do it. But I will say, and I've told this to a lot of people, if you're not going to do it consistently, and I do believe weekly is the, is the minimum cycle, if you're not going to do it consistently, it's almost not worth doing because you will be, you will make all that effort and then it will just disappear into thin air in no time. You'll not have had the time to build the audience, which is the compounding asset that you want. It's not the content, it's the audience. So.

And if you don't.

Yeah.

And if you don't believe that, like if you haven't hung out with celebrities, they get that. You know, people ask all the time, oh, I can't believe you got, you know, Martha Stewart or this person to come and like on. Come and speak at your events. Like, these people, they know they need to work.

Yeah.

They know that if there's a day when they're not on TV and they're not in front of people, they just slid back.

Yes.

And it's going to be harder to make up the ground that they lost. And it is the same when you choose to build a personal brand. When you choose to build a founder brand, you are choosing fame as a source of media and you are under all the same rules. There is one last thing, though, that I know we're running up on time that I. That we didn't talk about that I think is just worth mentioning that if you're going to have a personal brand, if you're going to have a founder brand, I personally believe in addition to the publishing once a week, I think very quickly, you got to get a book.

Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, I think there's got. And it needs to be good and it needs to reflect. But don't write a book until you got a point of view. Yeah.

And it took both of us like a million years to get a book also, which is pretty funny because we've. I know we tried. We retained services, we had ghostwriters, like, at all. Never became. I guess part of it was we wanted it to be good, like if we were going to put our name on it and have it be a book by us. And so you've got the Scalable operating system book that you just launched. Right?

Get Scalable. Yep.

Get Scalable. That's the name of the book. Yep.

Get Scalable. The operating system your business needs to run and scale without you. And yeah, it's a book that took me about 23 years to write. Thinking about it, like developing the ideas. No, I mean, literally, it was about two years to actually from the time I decided I was going to write the book until it was finally done, which looking back on, it's completely stupid. Could have been done much faster if I weren't so precious about it, had I. If I'd have been putting ideas out into the marketplace, you know, getting that feedback, man.

Even if you do, though, it's. It's. It's something to me. It's. It's a big deal. It's become easier, what I finally did. So I wrote one years ago, about almost 20 years ago now in. When I was Practicing law. And, and I wrote it. And it, I wrote it in about 10 days and, and that was quite the experience. And it was kind of sharing my structuring knowledge and stuff like that, but giving you guys a couple of things that might be helpful. As you look at this, the zero down book that I've got came from doing a. A recorded event. And basically I sent the recorded event off and had it transcribed, which we don't have to do anymore because AI gives us things like Descript that will just automatically do it. But I sent it off and had it transcribed, took the transcript, sent it to an editor and said, turn this into a book. And now I've got one. And we've sold thousands and thousands of copies of it. And it's a great lead generator. It's not like a thought leader kind of book though. It's more about, you know, it's more of a design to generate leads, although I do think it's cool. And then we used AI 100% to create this book which is called Wrenches to Riches or the Spanish version which is called De Harmana Safortun or something like that. And that's all done 100% by AI and I didn't put my name on it. Those are done under a company name because I didn't want it to be confused with the thought leader type books. But now we've got a book. I've got a book coming out with Jay Abraham called Business Wealth Without Risk, how to Create a Lifetime of Income and Wealth Every Three to Five Years, which is more of my thought leader book that's launching very soon. And because I've been working on several for a long time, I also have one consulting for equity, one called Exit Ready and another one called Five Exits that are all coming out like over a few months. Because I guess it's like I'm too add to only do one thing. So like I'm going to do this book and now I'm going to stop focusing on that and do this. And it took forever to get it to happen. But the cool thing is, is now I've got. I've got too many coming out and, and so there's lots of ways for you guys to do this. We hired a ghostwriter. I didn't. It did not work for me. Even with a very good service that I actually and Ryan owned a little slice of, couldn't ever get it to happen. We ended up having the most success with a writer person that Ryan, I think through Emily. Right. Isn't that where she came from?

Yeah. Well, I met her friend of my wife's, but also worked for us for a season before she left and went off and started her own thing. But, yeah, I mean, somebody who is an author who can write books, who has a history of writing books. But I think that if you want the book to be yours, then you need to have a really strong point of view and you need to personally present that point of view in some format. And that could be, again, through talks that you give at live events, that could be through a virtual event, webinars and challenges and those kinds of things. It could be through a course or something. But you need to put the ideas out there in some kind of finished form that the writer can then take it and turn into a book.

Right.

I think just having a ghostwriter interview you about things, I'm not saying that it can't work just in.

Neither you or I could get it to work. That's the bottom line.

And I know people who've done it, and I just don't think their books are all that great. I think that either what you need to do is you need to just sit down and write the book, or you need to put the ideas out there in a format that's more comfortable with you, audio, video, whatever, and then collaborate with somebody on taking your ideas and turning it into a book. That's not ghostwriting. That's really.

It's.

It's very kind of deep editing, but that's what I believe it takes to get a book that is worth reading. Love it.

Awesome. Well, I hope this was helpful to you guys. Personal brand. We're pro personal brand, both of us, at exactly the same time now. And I think it would be helpful to you as well if you guys found this podcast helpful, please share it with a friend and we will see you on the next episode. Hey, Roland Frazier here. If you're looking for a way to grow your business exponentially to get more customers and ultimately increase your wealth, there's no faster way to do it than to acquire other businesses that already have the customers, products, services, teams, and media that you want. If you want to double your sales, just acquire a company that has the same sales as yours. It sounds simple, but far too many people end up starting new businesses that fail and forget that they could skip all the hard stuff and just acquire one that already exists. There's a reason why private equity firms, family offices, big companies like Apple, Google, and some of the smartest entrepreneurs on the planet do not start new businesses from scratch, they acquire already successful businesses and when they do it, they instantly increase their sales, their profits. If they want market share, they increase that, they can get new products and services to offer all instantly. Hey look, 90% of new businesses fail. 90%. Why not acquire an already successful business and increase your chances of success by 900%? What most people don't realize is you can acquire highly profitable businesses with no money out of your own pocket. You in pretty much any country in the world, regardless of your credit and without having to go find a bunch of investors or needing any experience. Look, I've been acquiring businesses for over 30 years now and I cover the whole process in my EPIC Investing Strategy training and I want to give it to you 100% free. Just visit businesslunchpodcast.com epic to get your free access to my EPIC investing training right right now, while it's available.

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