THIS TRICK Helps You BREAK THROUGH With Your Personal Brand | Rory Vaden

Our premise and our philosophy is based on the idea that the way that you break through the wall is simply to become known. For one thing.

I want to focus on the importance of personal branding because I feel like we're heading towards an interesting trajectory moving forward. Who needs a personal brand and why?

The only people that need personal brands are people who need to be trusted. That's it. So if you need to be trusted, then you need a personal brand. And obviously we just did this big. My wife, our CEO, my business partner, A.J. just this huge national research study, this PhD led study. It's all statistically valid, weighted to the U.S. census and all that sort of stuff that talks about, you know, the data that supports that. We can now prove how having a personal brand makes you more trusted. It makes you more likely for people to spend money with you. It means that people are more likely to come to work for you, more likely to do all these things, even more likely to get a date. Statistically.

No more swipe left. No more swipe left.

Yes. But, you know, I'll let her talk about the data and all that stuff from her study. Here's how I would break it down. Personal branding is not something new, really. Personal branding is simply the digitization of reputation. The digitization of reputation. The concept of reputation has been around as long as people have been around. What are you known for? What do people say about you when you're not there? What do people think of when they think of you?

Who can you help? How can you serve? What can I trust you to do? What can I trust about you? And all of that ties into almost every interpersonal encounter in every facet of our lives. So personal branding is huge. And even though the term is sort of new, the concept is old and timeless.

Well, I mean, if the core, the core piece is trust, what is the greatest problem that people are facing in trying to build an influential personal brand?

Yeah, so it's funny.

The number one problem is distraction.

It is that they talk about too many things to too many different people on too many different platforms.

Guilty.

And we sometimes say distraction or dilution. Officially, we will say the problem is obscurity is to be unclear, untrusted and unknown. But the first part of that is to be unclear when you. So in my. Our first book was called Take the Stairs. That was sort of How I Broke through the Wall was my very first book. And that was a personal development book. But one of the quotes that was in there, there's this chapter called the Magnification Principle of Focus and we talk about how, you know, if you lay a piece of paper on the ground outside, nothing happens to it, but if you hold up a magnifying glass between the sun and the piece of paper, the paper catches on fire. Because literally, physically, scientifically, focus is power. Literally. And when you have diluted focus, you get diluted results.

The number one reason why brands fail is because they are not clear about what they are trying to say. They are not clear about how they are different. They're not clear about what is unique about them.

Yeah.

And we use she hands wall, which you, you're, you know, obviously you're familiar with, but you want me, Can I talk about she hands wall?

Oh, heck yeah. I mean, we gotta help everybody get through the wall, man.

Okay. So we named this concept after a colleague of ours, Peter Sheehan. Because Peter originally kind of shared the core of this idea. We've kind of adapted a little bit for personal brands, but we named it after him because he inspired the concept. And basically that in any industry, in any vertical, in any group.

You know, however you want to look at it, there's two groups of people in the world. There are those who are unknown. Yep. And there are those who are known. They're, they're, they're reputable, they're respectable or they're at least popular. And most of us are trying to move from the unknown group into the known group because you have more visibility, more trust, more influence, more income, more impact. Most of our audience, by the way, we serve what we call mission driven messengers at Brand Builders Group. So that's, that's like you, that's one of the reasons why you're such a great client is you care more about impact than you care about income. It's not that you don't want income. We want income. We're good at income. But you care more about impact. So don't equate this with just fame or something like that. It's really about impact. It's really about influence and shaping the world. But either way, you're trying to be move from unknown to known. And in between those two groups is this gigantic, very thick wall. It's very thick. It's very thick. And we call it she hands wall. And what most people do is if you're kind of in the unknown category, we tend to look at what are the people in the known category are doing and we try to like emulate them. And we'll go, oh, well, they're like on all these different social media platforms. So I'm Going to be on all the social media platforms and it's like, well, they share their whole life. They talk about, you know, people love it when they talk about their kids and you know, so it's like I'm going to talk about my kids and my exercise routine and what I eat for lunch and what I do at my job and a little bit about like whatever my company is and how I make money or my side hustle or whatever. And so they have all these different messages.

And then they're on a lot of different platforms and they have a lot of different ideas and a lot of times they have different, a lot of different business models. They go, oh, I should start a course. No, you know what I should do? Live events. Actually a bunch of people are making money in masterminds. Let me do that. But really, you know, if you do monthly membership site, you can just have recurring revenue. It'll be amazing. You know, one on one coaching is highly profitable. Um, but you know, yada, yada yada, there's all these different business models and when you have diluted focus, you get diluted results. And so what happens is most people are bouncing off the wall. Yeah, they're throwing a lot of stuff at the wall. They, they're bouncing off the wall and even though they're frustrated by the idea that there's noise and they can't break through.

The honest truth is they are the noise. They are creating noise. They are literally making indistinct volume of doing a lot of stuff in a lot of places, in a lot of ways, to a lot of people, all the time.

And our premise and our philosophy is based on the idea that the way that you break through the wall is simply to become known for one thing, to become the world's leading authority on blank.

And once you break through the wall on that one thing, like to have a chance to break through the wall, you have to dominate this one thing. Now once you're on the other side of the wall, you can expand and do anything you want. You can talk about lots of things and there's a couple really great examples of this. Some of them are our clients, but let's use two that are not our clients, but there'll be ones that everyone's familiar with. Gary Vaynerchuk is a great example of this personal brand. He talks about everything. He's got businesses and everything. Like he talks about personal development and investing and like, you know, NFTs and entrepreneurship and sports and music and like all, all this different stuff and people Go well, well, Rory, what about Gary Vaynerchuk? Like, he talks about everything. He completely defies your, you know, be clear on one thing. And it is true that Gary Vaynerchuk talks about everything today, but that's not how Gary Vaynerchuk got started. Yeah, Gary Vaynerchuk broke through the wall talking about one thing on one platform. Do you remember? You know what it was?

Wine.

Wasn't it Wine? On what platform?

Twitter?

No, YouTube. He broke through the wall with WineLibrary TV on YouTube. His dad had a liquor store and he was trying to, like, help his dad sell more stuff, and he had a passion for wine, and that is where he broke through. Now, a lot of people know him from Twitter because he was one of the early influencers on Twitter, for sure. And, like, the first person, I think, to get to a million. But that audience came really out of wine. That was how he got started, and that was how he broke through the wall. Amazon, as a company is a great example in the, like, literally, today, Amazon sells almost everything. I mean, it's only a matter of time before you can, like, buy a car.

I don't think there is much of anything they don't sell, with the exception of maybe some cars. That's about it.

It's got to happen. I mean, at some point, it's like, it's going to happen, right? And they're just going to deliver a car to your house. But, like.

In the beginning, Amazon sold one product. They had literally one thing that they did. They sold books. And a lot of people don't remember that, but that was how they started. They broke through the wall on that one thing. The single best piece of personal branding advice I've ever heard, which is not Rory Vaden or AJ Vaden or Brand Builders Group saying, I wish it was, but this was something that I learned from one of my mentors, this guy named Larry Wingett. And he said this. He said, the goal is to find your uniqueness and exploit it in the service of others. Find your uniqueness and exploit it in the service of others. And it's the first time I heard that, I immediately knew it was brilliant. One of the most brilliant things I've ever heard. And I got it like, that is the secret. That is the key. And we emulated it with our first book, um, Take the Stairs, which solved one problem, Procrastination. It was about one message, which is discipline and doing things you don't want to do and the metaphor of take the stairs. And so we broke through that book hits number two on the New York Times and number one, Wall Street Journal. And I get, you know, TED talks and blah, blah, blah. Like so much has come as a result of that one moment. Solving one problem with one message, and that is the first step. But most people can't do it. Most authors can write an entire book but cannot answer in one sentence. Or what we push our clients to do is answer in one word. What problem do you solve? Most speakers can talk for an hour but cannot answer in one sentence. What do you want the audience to do when they are done? And they lack. They have passion, but they lack clarity. And that's why they bounce off the wall.

Well, I know that, you know, for me, like, I. It's so good to hear you talk about this because, by the way, it's funny how you just glanced over your 4 million view plus TEDx talk, by the way. Just throwing that out there. If people haven't seen it, they need to go check it out. But I was that guy, right? We've known each other for off and on. You know, we've known each other for a while, but worked together off and on with a couple different things. And I remember when I reached out to you first time, when I finally first discovered brand builders, I was like, dude, you know, I've spent so much money trying to do it this way and trying to do it that way and trying to do a product this way, do a product that way, try to talk about entrepreneurship and talk about life and both things I'm qualified to discuss. But I had no certainty as far as, like, you know, I remember your agent that came that I actually flew out here to spend two days with me to dig into this to come up with the Helix, the branding of Helix, which I'm excited to talk about in a second. But when they came out here, I could not articulate that. All I knew was I wanted to serve people. I knew what my backstory was. I knew the lessons that I've learned. I knew what I later learned from you guys, which is pillar points. And I had that stuff, but I could not laser focus it to save my life. And as a result, I spent five years of ultimate frustration, loss of money, loss of energy, frustrating my friends and my family, who started off like, yes, you can do anything. You can do this. You can do this. We believe in you. And after five years, you're like, I don't. I just don't know if this is for you, man. I'm like, you know, because if it was going to happen, it would have happened by now. And then, lo and behold, you know, I, I took advantage of a free brand strategy call that you had that you thank God you still offer today and you know, partner with brand builders myself flew everybody out here. We spent two days and literally when, when the team left out of here, I had a very, very, very focused, very, very intentional methodology for moving forward, which I had never had before, you know, and I've, you know, I've had a couple people that even my dentist that I sent to you guys who's a very, very like world renowned dentist, like, he's not, he's no joke. You know, I sent him to you guys and he came back to you, said, man, that's the best thing I've ever done, man, you know, kind of thing. Because he was like me. I mean he, and he already had an audience, he already had grit and tenacity. He was, you know, he was like everybody else in this, in this personal brand space, this, this mission driven messengers as you as you guys call them, where everybody want, is wanting to do the right thing, but because we're trying different things, we're not talking about the right things or we're not super, super summarized. We all are bouncing off the walls. And I had never thought about it until you mentioned it to me about the power of basically, hey, you actually are creating noise like because you're over here talking about life mastery, then you're over here talking about business, then you're over here talking about family, then you're over here talking about your upbringing. Like, dude, focus. Was it focus? Danielson focus. Right, and, and no. And that's, I think that's why it's so important, so powerful for people who are, who have aspirations of building a personal brand to begin working on it, but do so in the right way because otherwise they're going to do like I did. They're going to waste five or 10 years trying to figure it out on their own, probably go through all of their savings in the process and never actually get the, never actually get there. And one of the things that I know that spoke to me, that taught me a great deal is this concept called the brand DNA helix. Would you mind taking a few moments and breaking that down for everybody? Because it was instrumental in, you know, myself and I haven't quote, unquote necessarily broke fruit, she answered, but I've cracked that sucker like it's cracking, you know. So talk to us a little bit about that if you don't mind.

You're making moves for sure. Which I love it, I love it. So, yeah, you know, I mentioned Larry Wingett's quote, find your uniqueness and exploit it in the service of others. As brilliant as that quote was, he didn't really have a method for teaching people how to find their uniqueness. He just said, that's what you should do. And so when we exited our first company in 2018 and suddenly we had to start a new business and like a non competing space and all that, and it's like, what are we going to do? Lo and behold, the day that happened, a guy named Lewis Howes called us and actually became our very first client. And you know, Louis has told the story many times on his show. Just kind of like what you just shared about working with us. But it was like, okay, how do we, how do we help someone find, find their uniqueness? Because it is difficult. It's hard to do. It's extremely difficult to do it for yourself. And I'll give you our process and you might be able to take yourself through it. I mean, most of the people.

Yeah, we usually have to end up taking people through it. But I'll tell you what the process is. And we have, you know, we have 14 stops on what we call the brand builder journey. And the first, the first stop is finding your brand DNA. It is the very first step. And so the brand DNA helix is our central framework for the finding your brand DNA.

And it's six questions. They work in pairs like chromosomes, and they are all meant to find your uniqueness. And so what happens here conceptually is you go.

We found that if you were to answer each of these six questions sort of like one by one, and you, they're not one answer for each, you sort of brain dump answers for all six. And then if you were to sort of like overlap all the answers at the intersection of the answers of those six questions is sort of like where the uniqueness reveals itself. So it's a, it's a little bit of a messy process and it's, the process is the same for everybody, but the outcome of the uniqueness is truly different. We have now led hundreds of clients through this, almost maybe a thousand, and never had the same uniqueness for two different people. But the genesis, the very first question, which is the genesis, like if someone says, I want to build my personal brand, like what is the first step? The first step is simply this. You have to answer this one question in one word. And it shouldn't be so hard, but it's freaking Hard, that is. What problem do you solve? In one word, what problem do you solve for the world? And this matters because people spend money to solve problems. Most of us, when we think of money, we, we, we think of it as like spending money on luxuries. Like I'll buy a nice house or a nice car or go on vacation or whatever. But in reality, most people spend their money much faster to solve problems. It's like, you know, I'd love to buy a nice car, but I'm only going to do it like if I can afford it. But if the water heater breaks, I'm going to find the money. If my kid gets sick, I'm going to find the money. I will go into as much debt as I have to to help my kid. And I am a Dave Ramsey disciple, non debt, pay cash for everything as you are. But it's like if push came to sub and it was like one of my boys were sick, I would do any, I would sell everything, I would rack up whatever I had to, right? So we pay money to solve problems. Hopefully you have emergency fund and you don't need to do that.

The.

So as a personal brand, as an expert, as a business owner, marketing in general, you should be marketing the problem you solve as much if not more than marketing the way you solve it. Most people all want to market how do they solve the problem? Or they market what happens in if you solve the problem, but they're not clear about what problem they solve. And this is a real problem, right? Because I know that you're. For me, when I come to you and you say, do you have this problem? If so, I can help you solve it. Think about this interview, right? If you are unclear about your uniqueness, Brand Builders is the best, one of the best in the world to help you get clear on your uniqueness. And yep, right, it's we're very clear about the problem we solve, which ironically is sort of like a lack of clarity for most people about what their uniqueness is. So you have to be clear because if you can demonstrate that you understand the problem I have and you're able to describe the problem that I have, then it shows me that you know a lot about that problem and it helps me trust that you actually have practical answers, real life answers to help solve that problem. But if you don't know what your problem is, there's no way in hell your audience is ever going to know what problem it is.

Dude, I had so much trouble just trying to get the, you know, there's this big phrase in this, in this industry and thought leadership industry called copy. Copywriting. Write the copy, right?

The copy.

Dude, I wasted so much time, so much money trying to write copy because I wasn't clear. If you're not clear on the problem, you can't write copy to solve the problem. Talk about the problem, empathize with the problem, be compassionate about the problem. I hope everybody is like, really, really taking advantage of this. Cause this uniqueness thing is super duper important.

Yeah, well, and it's funny you talk about copy, right? Like, one of the other mistakes that people do is they immediately jump to what we call phase two. So I mentioned there's 14 stops in the brand builder journey. The first three stops are in phase one. And so writing copy isn't till.

Step stop four on the journey. And you can't write copy if you're not clear on your uniqueness. You will literally be shooting in the dark. Nothing will sound good. It will sound trite, cliche, inauthentic. And they'll be like, why? Why does none of this? Or you'll write something and nobody will take action. They won't buy, they won't opt in, they won't click. And it's like, why? Because it's not moving. Why is it not moving? Because it's not emotional. Why is it not emotional? Because it's not attached to your uniqueness. So even if you go steal the copy from the world's greatest copywriters, right? And you go over to, you know, Russell Brunson site and you steal his copy, which I am not advocating, not because his copy isn't good, but it's not good for you. Like, it won't work for you even though it works for him. And that's why it's frustrating. Because you go, I'm literally doing the exact same things everybody is doing and it's not working for me. Why? Because it's not connected to your uniqueness and you've skipped. You're trying to go to step four and you miss step one and two and three and you don't even know what the steps are. So what problem do you solve?

The second question coming back to the brand DNA helix, just to kind of like refocus on step one is, what are you passionate about? Okay? So you make a list of all these problems you could solve, but then you have to reconcile them with what are you truly personally passionate about. And they're going to be reconciling questions because it's like, you know, my undergrad was accounting. I happen to be really good at spreadsheets. I love spreadsheets, But I'm not passionate about helping other people learn how to do spreadsheets, even though I love a good spreadsheet. So it could be a problem that I solve for people, but it doesn't pass the passion test. So it is a practical skill I could go out and teach, except I would burn out on it. And so this is another mistake people make is they go chasing the dollar and they go like, well, I want to do this business model or that business model, and I can get a lot of people to pay me to do this thing, but I'm not passionate about it. And so it works for a while and then they burn out. And so it's. So you got to have the passion. And the passion, by the way, is not just like sunshine and rainbows type passion. That's part of it is like, what gives me life, what gives me joy. But one of the things we teach our strategists to do is we also.

Ask, what pisses you off? What makes you mad? Like, what makes you so angry that you're. Or what makes you sad? What breaks your heart? Like, what moves you to tears because you go, I'm not okay with this existing in the world? Those are all hints. They're clues to your uniqueness that we have to train our strategist to. That we figured out that we can train our strategists to look for when they're taking somebody through this. So those are the first two questions. What problem do you solve? And what are you passionate about? Those give us indication as to what you kind of want to talk about. And then question three and four work in tandem. There is what do you research? Meaning what do you have educational head knowledge of? What have you studied? What have you learned about? What do you. What do you know something about? Um, but then we reconcile that with the fourth question, which is, what do you have results in? Yeah. Which is totally different. That is, what do you have experience doing? What have you actually like? What path have you actually freaking walked down? What heartbreak have you been through? What personal problems and pain have you overcome? Which, by the way, is one of the reasons why AJ and I started Brand Builders Group, because we know what it's like to be a 20 something year old going, I have this calling to serve the world, but I have no idea how to become a New York Times bestselling author. I have no idea how to get a TED Talk. I certainly don't know how to get it to go viral. I don't know. I want to speak in arenas, but I don't even know what that looks like or, you know, we also started as entrepreneurs, and so now a lot of our audience are not just authors and speakers and coaches. That was initial audience because that's the journey we've walked down. I mean, we've lived. Lived that world, but we've also lived being the entrepreneur and going, how do I get to it? I want to attract clients without having to make outbound, cold calls. That was another part of my story, is I went door to door for five years and I hated it. It was horrible. It was painful. Like every day. I cried like it sucked. It was the worst thing that I ever did. And I wanted to figure out a way to do a business differently to where I wasn't bugging people and annoying them, but I was attracting people who wanted to be introduced to me. And so.

Those are questions three and four, which, by the way, I'll give you a shortcut. I'm going to get. Yeah, let's do it.

Let's go. Let's go.

Okay, so there's two other questions here, 5 and 6, which we could talk about. But here's the thing to understand.

If there was a shortcut to finding your uniqueness. And we didn't know this when we started the company, but now, a few years into it and hundreds of clients, we now know, and this is a thing that we teach internally to our strategists.

It is realizing.

That for all of us, you are always most powerfully positioned to serve the person you once were.

You are most powerfully positioned to serve the person you once were.

Yeah.

That is the shortcut to finding uniqueness. So we go through all these six questions and there's, you know, all these exercises and stuff we do. But in every single case, the most powerful personal brands are speaking with a realness. And then like, you know, authenticity is kind of a weird word.

It's like compassion, empathy, rolled up into one.

It is. It is authenticity, sincerity, compassion, authenticity, empathy rolled up into one. Because when you. When here's a again to the. To the she hands wall, this is the mistake that everybody makes is they go, I want to change the world. And so they. They try to talk to the world. They try to address everybody. You will get much farther by not doing that, but instead saying, I want to talk to people who were just like I was five years ago or 10 years ago. And the irony is by addressing one person and talking at one person, who is today like you were in your past? You will reach thousands and tens of thousands and potentially millions of people. But if you try to talk to the world, you will reach nobody. You will bounce off the wall. You are part of the noise. And so you have to get clear about this is your uniqueness. Right. You're uniquely equipped to serve people who are on a path similar to the path that you have been on. This is why Dave Ramsey broke through the wall. He went bankrupt. Like, he watched somebody come in and take his daughter's crib out of their house and sell it. And when you watch that, there's something that happens to a man. When you see that, yeah, it gives you a fire that no amount of money can extinguish. Tave makes a massive amount of money. A little bit.

He does.

All right? You can say a lot of things about Dave Ramsey. You cannot say that he does what he does just to make money. He had more money than he could ever spend a long time ago. He's doing it because he knows what it's like to sit in that moment and have someone come and repossess your kid's freaking crib. Like, that'll change your life, Right? I know what it's like to watch it walk into an airport a hundred times and look at the books on the shelf and go, how do I get my book there? Right? Like, I know what it's like to sit in an arena or a conference and look at the speakers and go, how do I get to be the person on that stage? Not everybody has that dream, but, like, I know that, you know, AJ is our CEO. She knows what it's like to go like, why are we just working so hard non stop? How do. There's gotta be an easier way to attract clients and do more business without putting more hours in.

Yeah.

It's based on reputation, which is what our uniqueness is as a company. That's our solution to obscurity, is to reputation. And the way you build reputation is to exploit your uniqueness in the service of others. Your uniqueness is based on the idea that you're most powerfully positioned to serve the person you once were.

Yeah, well, you know, there's not a. I know you. You kind of glossed over this a little bit. A little. About there being other options to find all this information out and figure all this out. After a decade of searching, a straight up decade of searching, you guys are the only people that I could find that can actually solve my problem of helping me get in front of people that I could serve. Right. And that was my core problem. And yes. So I was the definition of obscurity.

Right.

And I've been working really hard with everything that you guys have taught me and trained me over the last couple years to develop a solid reputation, not just within my own brand, but also a reputation with other people. So because, you know, you said this on a podcast or something not long ago. It was a Instagram story. It's been a little bit since you said it, but you were talking, alluding to a little bit with your and Lewis's relationship. And in fact, you guys are close friends, and you said, look, I built the relationship with Lewis before I ever knew I needed it. Right. And that's a form of reputation in and of itself. But let's assume for just a second that people watching and listening right now are wise enough to go ahead and schedule a free brand strategy call. Cause I'm telling you, they need to, like, or they can. They can do like I did, Spend their wheels, waste their money, do whatever they want to increase the pain if you want. Or you can just learn by experience.

And by the way, I think if you go to. We said it's brand call dot or stevenscoggins.com brand call.

Yep. Stevenscoggins.com brand call dot.

And then they can request a free call with our team. And we do. The first call we do with Everybody is free. And we kind of, like, understand their vision and, like, trying to kind of get an assessment and. And just to clarify, too, like, you know, yes. Louis Howes, we do a lot with. We've been working with him for several years. We have some major celebrity clients, you know, people on the COVID of Time magazine, several, you know, many billionaires. But most of the people we work with, like, people hear about the 5% of our clients. Cause they're, like, pretty well known. 95% of our clients are, like, intermediate or they've been stumbling along, or they're just starting out. They're just trying to figure it out. It's like, you know, they're. They're, you know, you don't. It's that 95%.

That 95% is not building momentum. I'm telling you right now. I began to build momentum when I began to follow a process. And I didn't follow the process before because I didn't know there was a process. I didn't know there was actually a process in order to break through the she hands wall thing to actually undercover what my brand DNA is like, who I'm supposed to serve what my uniqueness is, what my problem to solve, that I. Is what my core message is. Like. I didn't know what any of that stuff was, you know what I'm saying? Now what I want to do, though, is I want to talk about the next step in the process just a little bit. I think you referred to it as a revenue engine, which is actually. Okay, well, how are you going to revenue or with your business model? Because I can tell you I am. It's funny when you talk about this, this. This person that's like, okay, they're, they're. They're making noise or just throwing stuff that hits at the wall. Like, if you know me well enough, you know that I'm constantly moving and doing and trying and grinding. It's part of who I am. Right.

So, you know you're a massive action taker, buddy.

Yeah. So I'm that guy. Right? I'm that guy. So I. I am. You know, maybe why. And maybe that's one of the reasons why it's been so pivotal for me, but one of the things that you guys helped me get super clear on is to be able to lean into what my strengths would be rather than trying to, you know, to build the next financial piece, university or school of greatness or any. None of these, Any one of these other amazing programs. It's like, what do you. What are you. What are you going to build? So you had this concept called DARES that I, that if you got time, I'd love for you to break down to everybody, because I think. I think people can kind of grasp the importance now of understanding how. How important being clear is. But I also want to be able to increase the hope notch, if you will. Okay, so you get clear now you get moving. How do we get moving using dares?

Yeah. And how do you. And how does this turn into money? Which is a good question.

Otherwise. Otherwise you'll suspend a lot of it.

Yeah, yeah. Well, and it's. It's. So this is part of our uniqueness, too. So this is question five and six of the Helix. So that's a really good segue. So question six are, what are all the things people would buy from you? And there's only five ways to monetize a personal brand. And then question six is, what type of business do you want to be in? Which is the dares? So we'll talk about both of these, but before we dive into that, it's funny, because a lot of people who do branding, it's like websites and logos and colors and pictures. And that is actually very little of what we do. Like, we actually don't do any of that. We advise on that stuff because we help. Part of messaging is part of what we do, but we're more like a seat. What a CMO is to a company is what we are to a personal brand. Like, we oversee the big picture. We don't. We're not the people you call when you're like, which tint of yellow should I use? We leave that to the creative experts. Right.

But making money is a huge part of this is going, how do I turn this into money? And you'd be surprised too. We have a lot of clients who have lot of followers, but not a lot of dollars. Yeah, there's. There's a lot of clients that are, you know, it's more like you're Twitter rich but your dollar broke. And I would say we also have the inverse, which means you don't have.

A business yet, by the way.

Right. And we have a lot of clients who you never heard of. But it's like this person could write a build, could, could write a check for a private plane. You never even heard of them. And you. And in your world, you're going, well, if they don't have any followers, like, who are they? And it's like, be careful, especially at a Brand Builders Group event, like, you might be sitting next to one person you recognize, but the person next to you could, like, write a check that would take care of your entire future. So it's, It's. They're not the same thing. And fortunately, one of AJ's, which is my wife, she's our CEO, by the way. I'm more like our CMO. AJ is our CEO. We're both business partners, though, and they're.

Both smart as all get out, by the way.

Thank you for that. But one of AJ's spiritual gifts, and I think she actually took an assessment one time and found out that one of her spiritual gifts gifts is making money, which, for the record, is an awesome spiritual gift to have a spouse.

And she's just good at it. She's good with money, she's intelligent, understands how to add value to people's lives. And that's really awesome. But so that's one of the things we do, is we have the money conversation. Like, how do we turn this pile of followers into a pile of cash? Because at the end of the day, you know, we do want a pile of followers. Not because of vanity, because it represents impact. But if you don't have money to fuel the machine, then it's like a nonprofit and it's going to run out of gas. Or it's like, you got to have some money to like fuel this thing.

Yeah.

All right, so there's five ways. There's only five ways to monetize a personal brand. We call them the paid. It's an acronym. These are the page. The five ways to get paid. P, A, I, D, S. So the P stands for product, physical product.

The A stands for ads and affiliates. The I is information products.

Okay.

The D is deals, which are third party deals. And the S is services.

So which are like time for money exchange type services. So you have your personal brand, you've got all these followers. There's five ways to turn it into money. One is to say I made this physical product. A shoe, a calendar, a T shirt. Like what. Whatever. Whatever it is. There's this day planner, like a physical product product that I'm going to sell. If you're Sarah blankly, you're selling them Spanx. If you're Elon Musk, you're selling them Teslas. Like if you're Richard Branson, you're selling them airline tickets and whatever else. Right.

Like a physical product or as hotels.

Whichever or hotels. Right? So then you have a. Which is ads and affiliates, which is. I have a pile of followers and I'm not going to sell them anything. I'm going to sell other people access to my audience. Typically, either companies are going to pay me to advertise to reach my audience, or they'll do affiliates where they don't pay me anything on the front end, but they pay me a percentage of whatever is sold on the back end. Brand Builders Group is an affiliate program. A huge number of our climb. You're one of our affiliates. Louis is affiliate. Donna Miller and Chalene Johnson, like all these people are, they, they have a good experience with us. They introduce us to their audience and we, we, we track all the leads and they all get paid a percentage. Any of our clients can become an affiliate. We want our clients to make money that way. So that's ads and affiliates. The I is information services, which are information products, which is, you know, courses, membership sites, assessments, certification programs. They've been really big in recent years.

Do seminars and speaking fall in the.

I category or the service no services category. Okay, so if you're doing a time for money exchange, it is a. It's a, it's a, it's a service, right? So if I'm Doing a public seminar, speaking, coaching, consulting, training, financial advising, chiropractic, fitness, instructing, lawyering, cooking. Like anytime you're like doing a thing for somebody, that's going to be service, which is a lot services. This is a good segue. Services are almost always the fastest path to cash. It's the fastest way to make decent money.

But they are the least scalable long term because they're dependent on the person. And so that's why sometimes we catch people early on going, gosh, I hate my job, I really want to quit my job. And so it's like, well, the fastest path to replace your income is probably offering some type of service. But then a lot of people come to us, they're like, well, I've been speaking, I've been consulting, I've been, you know, I'm doing this other thing. But now I can't make any more money because it's all my time is maxed out. And you go, that's where the dares come in. So DARES is what type of business do you want to create next?

And so we encourage our clients to look for the dares, which is another acronym. It's things that are digital, automated, recurring, evergreen and scalable. Digital, automated, recurring, evergreen and scalable. Those are the dares. If there were a perfect business model, which there are not, they all have advantages and disadvantages. They all work, by the way. And they all also don't work, especially if you're doing many of them at once. That is the most common reason they break down, is the biggest reason people fail in their business model is not because the business model is bad. It's because. Is because they're doing too many business models at the same time. Right?

They have dilution, right? They have dilution. It's the same as diluting your message, diluting your audience, right? Is you dilute your money by trying to offer too many different things versus cause. Here's. Let me tell you some crappy advice that you've heard. Have multiple.

I probably used most of it.

Have multiple streams of income is crappy advice. Terrible advice. When you're first starting out. When you're first starting out, you do not want multiple streams of income because what you will have is a bunch of multiple streams of crappy income. I promise you, the way you get wealthy is to have one stream of incredible income. Like that is how you break through the wall financially. Now once you have broken through the wall, you can diversify only when you're on the other side. And you go, now I Have enough money. I can allow my money to work for me in different ways. But almost every wealthy person, in fact, I don't know a single wealthy person that I can think of that didn't initially get wealthy from one focused activity. And then they diversify. So multiple streams of income is a message for rich people, not for beginners. Like, you need one awesome stream of income. And so anyways, if there was, if there was a perfect one, it would be digital, meaning it has no physical product. Like there's no physicality. There's no R and D costs, there's no patents, there's no manufacturing, there's no shipping. There's no like tariffs and taxes, like no warehousing. It's, it's, it's digital. But you can make a lot of money from a physical product, I. E. Sarah Blakely, right? Yeah. Then you have, you know, it's automated, meaning it's completely self service. You know, Netflix is completely self service. We don't talk to someone, we log in and we deal with it ourselves. It is automated, it's recurring, meaning people would continually pay for it over and over again. That's awesome. It's evergreen, meaning it never needs to be updated.

Yeah.

So Netflix is actually digital, automated and recurring, but it's not evergreen. It has to be updated. You have to add new movies and new shows, otherwise people would stop. Stop subscribing. Yeah. So you know, evergreen. And then is it scalable? Scalable means I can add lots of customers without adding additional expenses or overhead or staff. Yep. And you want to just try to. There's not a perfect combination. There's just the perfect combination for you with the page. There's not a. There's not a. There's not a right business model. There's just a right business model for you. And that has everything to do with your uniqueness, your audience, your message, your model, who your team is, how good you are with technology, and what assets do you currently have. And so unfortunately, people try to go watch. You know, they hop on Facebook and they see an ad for a free webinar to do something, something. And then they go, wow, this person looks like they got it figured out. Let me follow them. And they run down a path that can work, but there is no consideration whatsoever of does it work for me. And that's why we do one on one coaching. Steven is like, we know all these models. We have clients that are successful at all of them. We see behind the scenes of how they all work, but it's not the model it's about your uniqueness and what's the right fit for you. And, you know, so anyways, if you go to, if you go to stevenscoggins.com brand call, you can do this first free call and we can just like get to know you and start the journey if you're, if you're curious. Yeah.

And I just want to piggyback on that for just a second because I. The reality is, is the reason I think the Brand Builders group has been so successful in helping so many personal brands build out their personal brands, break through Sheehan's Wall, scale their businesses, scale their organization, is because your entire organization has the heart of a servant. The entire organization, top down. I haven't had one bad experience working with Brand Builders my entire time. And I've been a client now for what, almost a little over two years. And it's been inspirational to watch so many great people trying to help other fellow great people. Right? So, dude, I have loved it, man, I can't thank you enough for spending some time with me today, man. I really enjoy, always enjoyed hearing your thoughts, hearing your mentorship and learning. I've got a whole nother sheet of new notes that I've been making this entire time because I love it so much. Where can everybody else find out more about Rory Vaden?

I mean, I would say for now, just go to stevenscoggins.com brandcall I mean, you can, you know, find me on Instagram and you know, all over the place, like, but, you know, if you're, if you're curious, request a call, talk to our team, you know, and on the thing of service, Steven, I'm glad you mentioned, thank you for that, by the way. That is amazing about our team. And like, what a beautiful thing to say. Like, if anyone said anything about our team, I'd want it to be that and I'd also want it to be the thing they say about all of our clients. Yeah. And the Mission Driven messenger is a unique character because it's not just about making more money. It's not that we don't want to make more money. We do. We like money. We're good at money. But it's subservient to the idea of the mission. And here's what we realized. And some of you might be out there listening right now and you feel this calling on your heart, right? You're like, man, I want to share my message with the world. I don't know exactly what it is, but I feel called to write or speak or Teach or blog or make videos or do something where it's like, I feel called to do this.

Yeah.

And. And yet often the immediate second thought is, but who am I? I don't know how. Right. Like, I'm no Brene Brown. I'm no Tony Robbins. I'm no Mel Robbins. Like. Like I. Who am I? And what we have also realized and now seen time and time again is that.

The. The calling on your heart to do what you do is the result of a signal that's being sent out from somebody else out there who needs you. Yeah. And they need you. They don't need Tony Robbins or Brene Brown. They need you because they can only hear it from you. There is something about your story, your background, the way you look, the what you've been through that.

Occurs to them differently. They're tuned into your frequency. It's kind of like a radio station. We can both be playing the same song, but the listener can only hear one of it. One. One song, depending on what station they're tuned into. And so they can only hear it from certain messengers. And there are certain people who, even if what you're saying isn't that original.

It will be original because it's filtered through the lens of your uniqueness. And that's what makes it magical and important and transformative. And I'll tell you this, you might be scared about, you know, oh, I'm not sure I could do this, or I'm not sure that I'm good enough, or I don't know if the technology or like, whatever stuff. But you only feel fear when you're thinking about yourself.

There is no fear when the mission to serve is clear. Like when you're focused on serving. You know, like, if there's a car on fire, you're not going, ooh, does my hair look okay? Is my outfit cute? Like, if there's a car on fire and someone needs help, like you're over there helping somebody. Yeah. You need to make your personal brand the same way. Like, quit being so self conscious. Like, yeah. Be thinking about what do people need? And know that that person needs. Needs you way more than you need them.

That was my truth. I mean, I shared with you on your podcast not that long ago that my number one life lie was, am I worthy of a voice? And the reality is we're all worthy of a voice as long as we're positioned to serve the person we used to be. And you do that well, everything else comes with it, right?

Amen, brother. Thank you for having me. Steven, I wish you the best. Man, you are such a stud.

All right, man.

Take it easy.

See you.

All right. Bye.

If you love that interview, go ahead and check out this next one right here. And so if you tell me that I'm doing something wrong, I'm more apt to listen to you. Because I know you're doing it from a place of wanting to help me, not wanting to hurt me.