RV (00:07): Hey brand builder, Rory Vaden here. Thank you so much for taking the time to check out this interview as always, it’s our honor to provide it to you for free and wanted to let you know there’s no big sales pitch or anything coming at the end. However, if you are someone who is looking to build and monetize your personal brand, we would love to talk to you and get to know you a little bit and hear about some of your dreams and visions and share with you a little bit about what we’re up to to see if we might be a fit. So if you’re interested in a free strategy call with someone from our team, we would love to hear from you. You can do that at brand builders, group.com/pod call brand builders, group.com/pod call. We hope to talk to you soon. RV (00:54): I love it. Absolutely love, love, love when we have AJ on this show as, as a guest and not just a host, she’s brilliant. And I like, I’m not just saying that cuz she’s my wife and she’s my business partner. Like she is absolutely phenomenal. At selling, I mean’s several things, but specifically at selling, you know, like she is a one woman wrecking crew and I’m talking about she, she has had multiple years where she’s generated over a million dollars in revenue by herself as a one person individual. And so getting a chance to interview her and talk about how do you double your business in the next 12 months? Fantastic conversation worthwhile conversation. Of course, if you didn’t listen to it, you kinda wanna go back and listen to it. I’m gonna share with you what my highlights are and take away. RV (01:47): And you know, I, I hope this isn’t weird for you. Like I love learning from her, like, you know, just as a friend and a spouse, but as a professional colleague, I really, really love learning from AJ. And I find her philosophies very like original and refreshing and different. She has a very different take on the world. So I, I wanna share what my three top takeaways were from listening to her and just sort of like being around this conversation. And obviously she, the reason that she, one of the reasons she came on the show is cuz she wanted to let you know that she put together a completely free training about how to double your business in the next 12 months. And if you go to double dot brand builders, group.com, double dot brand builders, group.com, you can watch the whole free training. RV (02:37): Like it’s a whole presentation and everything. And it’s, I it’s, it’s gonna be it’s phenomenal. So the, with that, going back to what we talked about in the interview, the first thing that came up, which to me really is this necessary switch that has to happen. If you are gonna grow your business, like if, if you’re be a successful entrepreneur, salesperson, personal brand, like insert whatever term you want there, mission driven messenger. You have to reach this point where you decide that you are not ashamed of what you do and that it’s also not humble to not tell people about what you do. Like there is a switch that has to flip in your brain and, and for as, as much time as the switch is flipped to, I don’t wanna intrude on people. I don’t wanna push on people. I don’t wanna have to interrupt people to tell them about what I’m doing. RV (03:43): Like as long as that switch is flipped off, like flipped in that direction, you’re gonna struggle your whole life. Like the rest of time. Like until we flip this switch, you are going, you’re going to be broke. Like you’re gonna have a hard time because you’re gonna always be shy and embarrassed and timid about telling people what it is that you do. You can’t be timid about telling people what you do and have people find out about it, right? Like you have to be bold. You have to be powerful. You have to be assertive. You have to be commanding. You have to be convicted. Right. And it’s, and it’s not humble to, to not tell people what you do like humility is to me is, is, you know, I, I actually did an Instagram reel about this. That like the difference, like the opposite of humility is not self-confidence the opposite of humility is pride, right? RV (04:46): Self-Confidence is being convicted in, in, in what you do. Pride isn’t is about who you do it for, right? So this isn’t about you going, oh, I need to tell the world how great I am. That’s pride. That’s not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about being convicted to tell the world how great the thing is that you have can be for them, right? It’s not about, it’s the difference between pride and confidence is who you do it for self-confidence is going. I am a capable person of helping you. It is in service of you and in when I’m operating in service of you, that gives me the permission, the confidence the, the openness, the power, the authority, the, the, the, the white space, the invitation to kind of boldly proclaim and say, Hey, I’ve got this thing that will change your life. RV (05:42): It’s about you. Pride is when it’s about me. Let me tell you how great I am. Let me, you know, you, you should know me, look at what I’ve done. Look at who I am. That’s different than confidence, which is, let me boldly tell you about this thing that I have for you, how it can help you, what we have put together for how it serves you. And, and until you flip that switch, you’re gonna struggle. You’re gonna be broke. It’s gonna be hard. You’re gonna have a hard time finding customers. You’re gonna your marketing campaigns. Aren’t gonna work. You’re not gonna sell your sales people. Aren’t gonna sell. Why? Because selling marketing enrollment registrations are a matter of conviction. RV (06:27): There is this transference of going and listening to somebody who believes what they’re saying and not just believes what they’re saying. They believe that what they are telling me about is good for me. It’s not about them, right? They’re just the messenger. But the message is for me, the message can help my life. And that is you have to get to that point. I mean, think about it. You, you can’t shy your way into the world, knowing about you. You can’t timid your way into changing lives. You, you can’t soft pedal your way into making a difference in the world. You can’t, there’s too much noise. There’s too much competition for attention. There’s, there’s too much competition in general. There’s too much negativity. There’s, there’s too much misinformation. If you’re gonna win, it has to be bold and assertive. And, and DEC declarative, like I am here with something that can help you not look at me. RV (07:30): It’s look at this. It’s not who am I? It’s what do I have for you? But, but you have to make that switch. You have to turn that corner. Otherwise you are gonna be the world’s best kept secret. I mean, you’re not gonna be the world’s best kept secret. You’re just gonna be a secret. You’re just not gonna be known. And, and this, I think is one of the greatest struggles that mission driven messengers have. And why do we know this? Why do we, why do we have so much clarity about this? Because this is us. This is what we struggle with, right? For us, it’s a spiritual thing as Christians, we’re going, man, you know, the meek shall inherent the earth. So how do I, how do I stand up and go listen to my podcast and, and, and, and tell the world like, you should listen to this podcast. RV (08:16): How do we, how do we go? You know, like, oh, it’s, it’s, it’s, you know, harder for a rich person to, or a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to inherit the kingdom of heaven. How do we reconcile that? Because we go those messages, that construct, that concept is not about being broke and, and hidden and shy. And that’s not what it’s about. That’s about positioning. What’s the position in your life. And where do you stand in the pecking order of the things that matter, right? And, and so if you’re a Christian, right? The what, what we’ve realized and have come to understand from studying this really understanding scripture and sort of the heart of this is going, it’s not about how much money you have. It’s about what position money has in your life, right? If money is number one in your life, that’s a problem. RV (09:11): That’s, that’s what Jesus is talking about. He’s saying, I want the number one spot. I wanna be first. God should be first. And that’s what he’s saying. You can be rich and God can still be first. You can be poor and money can still be first. And God can be second, right? Even if you’re poor and God is, but money is first, or your pride is first, and God is beneath that. That’s the problem that’s going on there, right? It actually is completely separate of the quantity of money you have. It’s about the position of that item in your life. This is a positioning issue. This is the positioning in your own mind. Like, and, and you, you, until you flip the switch, you’re gonna be living with this struggle of like, oh, I’m self promotional or I’m I’m, I’m, I’m, you know, I’m, I’m arrogant. RV (10:04): I’m egotistical. Yes you are. If the mission is about you and as, and, and about elevating you and making people worship you and idolize you. Yes, that’s wrong. But if the mission is to push the message out to the world, if the mission is to solve a problem for the world, if the mission is to help other people, if it’s to elevate them, then you can do that and be bold. You have to be bold and powerful and assertive and loud and consistent and dominating because you won’t get heard. Otherwise, like you gotta, you gotta break through, like you can’t sit in a corner somewhere in a room and think the world’s gonna find out about the solution that you have, that you’re not gonna impact lives. You’re not gonna help people. So it’s rooted in service. It’s not rooted in pride. It’s rooted in service. RV (11:00): It’s not rooted in pride, but until you click until this clicks, you’re gonna struggle your whole life. Your business is always gonna struggle because you’re gonna be at odds. You are gonna be subconsciously self sabotaging because on the one hand, you want to grow your business. But on the other hand, you, you feel like there’s this spiritual battle of going, oh, I have to remain meek and humble. And until you reconcile this, you’re gonna struggle. And the way you reconcile it is realizing that they’re not remotely connected at all. I mean, even Jesus, like the great commission is go tell the world, proclaim it. Boldly. Not about how great we are, but how about how great he is about what he has done about who God is, but go boldly into the world. Why can we go boldly into the whole world? Because it’s not about us. RV (11:56): It’s about this cure. It’s about this message. And it’s about another person. It’s about him, right? That’s why you can do it. If you are at the center, that is a conflict. But if your expertise is at the center, if your service is at the center, if the product is at the center, if service is at the center, then you can proclaim it wildly and boldly and loudly and confidently without doing it. Pridefully you have to get this. If you’re ever going to grow your business, if you’re ever going to grow your reach, if you’re ever gonna break free of, of being financially poor, like this is, is a really, really big issue. So it was huge. Right? And so just hearing AJ talk about it and give her her take on it. Super powerful for me. The second thing is something we’ve been talking about a ton like AJ and I have been talking about this. RV (12:56): We’ve been talking about it with our own team internally. We’re getting, you know, we’re, we’re trying to like make sure our members, our, our messengers and our membership program like that, they’re all super clear on this. And, you know, wanna make sure that you’re in, in the loop on this too, which is this huge mistake that like the entire world has somehow been tricked, like misled. Like it’s like the entire world believes something that is so ineffective. It’s unbelievable. And here’s, here’s what it is. We have all been misled to think that the key to glory is selling to strangers on the internet. like, somehow we all bought into this idea that like, I’m gonna have millions of strangers that listen to me and follow me. And they will, they will magically buy because it’s through a video or a webinar or a podcast, right? RV (13:57): Like no, the path to riches is not through strangers on the internet. The path to riches is through trust. And the relationships of the people who know you in real life, the people who know your character, the people who love you, the who believe in you, the people who have been there in your darkest moments, the people who you’ve delivered for, it’s not millions of strangers on the internet. It’s a few dozen people who know you in real life. Why? Because it’s about trust. Now, can you make money from the internet and social media? Of course you can, but only after you’ve built trust, right? And it takes a long time to build trust. When people only watch, you know, three seconds of your videos at a time, they gotta watch a lot of three second videos before they actually really trust you. So it takes a long time. RV (14:52): The, the, your next great customer is not a stranger on the internet. Your next best customer is much more likely to be in your cell phone or in the cell phone of your current customer’s cell phones. It’s the people that, you know, like the people who know the people, you know, it’s leveraging the, the relationships. This is reputation, right? When you, when you hear personal branding, please don’t think social media and logos and colors and websites and YouTube channels and podcasts think reputation, right? That is what our company is about. The digitization of reputation. Like, yes, it is digitizing it. Yes, there are these modern things that we’re doing, but the core is not the digital part. The core is the reputation part, the character part, the, the, the personality, the integrity part. And so when it comes to selling and doubling your business in the next 12 months, it’s not going, Ooh, there’s some secret hack that I’m gonna learn on social media. RV (15:57): That’s somehow gonna introduce me to millions of people who are all then gonna buy from me, even if it does introduce you to millions of people, which can happen. And that’s a great thing and good things come from that. They’re not gonna all suddenly buy from you. You have to develop trust. And that takes a long time, a long time, right? Like a lot of people who buy from us, we, we had a, a great friend sign up this, this guy’s really cool guy. His name’s Ray Higg. And he joined our program yesterday and he’s got, he’s really huge in the network marketing space. And he’s got this program called rank makers. And, and he’s a great guy like and you know, him and his wife, Jess, like they have business together, but like, he really helps a lot of people that are in network marketing. RV (16:36): Like this is what he’s done his whole life. We’ve gone back and forth for a few years. And, and he just now became a customer because it was just like, it just takes time. Right? And so we, instead of believing this sort of lie that, oh, if every, if you do it, all right, people are just gonna flock to you and buy suddenly over the, you know, strangers from the internet instead it’s relationships, it’s reputation, it’s character. And so work through your relationships, work through the people who already know you get referrals from those folks. Right? So obviously our, our pressure free persuasion training is one of the reasons why we’re talking about this now because of the exit of our former company, there was, there was a window of time where we were bound by a non-compete. And so we couldn’t teach sales training. RV (17:22): And so we, we, we didn’t for a few years, but now we’re free of that. And, and we created this, I mean, life changing sales curriculum pressure free persuasion, which, you know, if you’re a member, you’ve got access to it. And it’s just like, you know, we teach this stuff, but the psych, the tactical part, but the psychological part is right here is going quit thinking the riches are gonna come from strangers on the internet. And instead start working through in a deeper way through the relationships you already have and asked to be introduced to people that’s and specifically getting referrals from your customers. Like if you’re not getting referrals from your customers, even if you only have one customer or five, like if you’re not getting referrals from your customers, you’re missing on the best, easiest, lowest hanging fruit for more revenue in your business. RV (18:12): And just ask yourself this question on a scale of one to 10, how good of a job are you at getting referrals from your current customers? My guess is it might be zero. like, you’re not even thinking about it. So think about that and, and, and work through those relationships. Because it’s trust, it’s a sales revenue, conversions, marketing, it’s a transference of trust. And so the digital things we do, because over the long term, they work because you can transfer trust digitally. It just typically takes longer than when you meet someone in real life. And it’s like, if we have dinner together for an hour, that’s a different experience than if you listen to a podcast for an hour. And that’s a different experience than if you see a, you know, a 62nd video on Instagram, they all can add up to equal trust, but you know, some of ’em take longer than others. RV (19:08): And so at scale, all this stuff works. That’s why we do it. That’s why we teach it. But it’s over the long term in the short term, do it through the relationships of the people you have, unless you have some massive platform, right. Then that’s, that’s the reason you have it is cuz you’ve been doing it for a while and you do have trust and there’s ways to monetize it. But for most of us, most of you, it’s gonna happen through the relationships that you have with real people in real life. And then the third thing, you know, third, big takeaway here. And, and I got a fourth bonus one, but the, the third one is when AJ was saying, just give away so much value that people feel compelled almost that they have to pay you for something. And that is such a rare philosophy. RV (19:59): I think like, I don’t hear people talk about it, but that is how AJ and I have built our life, our businesses. It’s like, we give it away. Like we give it away. We, it, it’s a, it’s a tremendous amount of time and pain and money to just give away so much of this stuff. But like, you know, a great example here recently is, is Tom and Lisa BIU. If you don’t know them, they’re awesome. They, they have a they’re superpower couple. They sold a company for a billion dollars. It was called quest nutrition. They were co-founders and now they have a, a huge podcast called impact theory. Well, Lisa had a book come out called radical confidence. We didn’t know them very well. I had known Tom a little bit. And so, you know, she’s doing her book launch and I said, Hey, did you think about this? RV (20:42): And are you guys doing this? And did you know this? And have you tried this and, and have you met this person and that person and this person, right. And just like, you know, we don’t charge for PR. PR is something we do for free for all of our, just our friends and clients. That’s just how we add value to the community is introducing people all the time. Right? So like the more we get to know somebody personally, the more likely we are to ntroduce them. So we’re introducing them, you know, just making connections, but we share tips with everybody, right? Like we’re sharing the same tips with them that we have, you know, somewhere in, in the archive here of all these podcasts, like, and we’re just going, Hey, are you doing this? And what happened was they literally said this. I mean, this is the craziest thing. RV (21:19): This is a true story. It happened recently. Right? And they’re really big deal. I mean, they’ve got millions of followers. That’s one of the biggest personal development podcasts in the world and an amazing reputation. And they’re tremendous people like super smart, super successful, wealthy, sharp, inspiring, tons of people, all of these things. And basically what they said was they said, Rory, this has reached a point where we feel guilty. Like about how much value you, we have gotten from you. You’ve been so helpful to us in, in, in our book launch Lisa’s Lisa’s book launch the book is called radical confidence. Right. And they were like, we have to hire you. like, we have to pay you some money. We, we, we need to, we, we don’t, we don’t feel good about this. Like we, we actually feel weird and you know, it’s funny, like that was never the intention. RV (22:12): The intention was just to be helpful, but it was amazing how good people, like really good people actually do start to feel a little awkward when you’ve given so much. Right. And you’re because at some point it’s like, golly, like you’ve done so much for me. Like, what can I give back to you? Like, how can I help you? Like, oh my gosh, like you saved the day here. I, I, I want to repay the favor. I need to repay the favor. It’s like their law of reciprocity. It’s not a manipulative thing. It’s, it’s a, it’s an abundance thing. It’s a generosity thing. It’s a person of character thing going, gosh, you’ve done so much. You’ve done so much for me. Like, what can I do for you? How can I help you? I wanna be a part of this. And that’s what happens, you know, so good people that that’s what happens. RV (22:57): And so like, that’s our whole strategy. I mean, that’s our whole content marketing strategy, give away everything for free. Like we teach you everything we know. And so anyway, so they hired us, right? So they’re, they are brand builders, group clients, and we made a huge impact even officially after they hire us. Like, so with Lisa, we helped Lisa grow her book sales 33% in 10 days, right. Of everything that she had done in the launch, we helped her increase it 33% in a 10 day window. You know, and then, you know, she hit the USA today, national bestseller list. It’s amazing. Right. So now we have another client who’s a national bestseller and all of this happened. She’s so cool. Like I love follower. She’s super sharp and sassy. You know, she’s, she’s really, really cool. And all of a sudden we ended up with another client. RV (23:47): That’s a very recognizable client. We’ve had a huge, added, a huge amount of value to their life. And she’s a national bestselling author as she straight up legitimately would not have been. If, if it, if it weren’t for us, like, like that’s a really cool thing to go. All we were doing was just trying to help. And, and as much as helping them, we were also helping our network. Right. Because it helps a lot of our friends and a lot of our clients to be able to get to interview somebody like Lisa and get to build a relationship with her. Right. So it’s, it’s not even like, Hey, let’s help her and see if we can get in, it’s going, how can we just help? How can we add value? And it’s, if you just look, it’s another switch here. Like, if you can flip this switch, if you can go, if you can shift from going, what can I get from you? RV (24:32): What can, what can you do for me? And you can flip the switch to go, what can I do for you? How can I help you? It radically changes your life and it changes your business, right? Like people are coming to us going. I heard you guys are the best. And it’s like, all we’re doing is trying to help. Right. you know, our stuff is really good. Like our content is really good. Like, we, we, we do, you know, we know what we’re talking about, but there’s other people in the world who do it, but I think it’s, it’s people are drawn to that heart of generosity and anyone can do that. And here’s, and here’s one of the reasons why I think we do it. I hated selling so much. Right. Like I went door to door and felt like such a scam artist. RV (25:17): And, you know, I learned some, some really shady techniques along the way about, about sales. Like just some, some, some pretty shady stuff. And I was like, I just don’t wanna be that guy. I don’t care if I’m not the number one salesperson, I’m not gonna be that guy. Like, it’s like the, I, the amount of money you could pay me, isn’t worth a compromise of my own character. Right? Like, I’m not gonna compromise my character just to earn a commission. I’m not gonna compromise my reputation just to grow my revenue. And AJ’s the same way. And I think, you know, that’s one of the reasons we end up married is like, we have this apparently unusual philosophy and belief system that it’s like, no, no, no. Like I know, I know if I use that technique, I could sell more, but I would feel horrible and I couldn’t live with myself. RV (26:11): I don’t care that much about money. I don’t care that much about recognition. I’m not gonna do that. So what we defaulted to was just like, how can we give, how can we serve? How can we help? And she became this multimillion dollar producer, like in, in her early thirties. And, you know, it’s just by giving. So how can you do that? Like how can you adopt that posture of, and, and the more reluctant you are about selling, the more, I would say, embrace serving, embrace, giving away, sharing what, know, give it away for free, just go speak for free, put it out on social media, teach it for free. And just test me on this. I promise you, the money’s gonna show up. I promise, like you cannot lose when you do this. Like you cannot lose. And, and this story with Lisa was pretty crazy because it was like, she literally was like we have to pay you something like for them, they were like, we can’t sleep at night knowing how one sided this relationship has been. RV (27:14): Right. Like and so it was like, okay, well, I guess, you know, send us some money, but it was literally like, it didn’t really change anything. We were, we were just helping, you know I mean, I guess it did, it made us block more time on the calendar to show up and sort of be on their schedule. Right. Rather than just kind of operating when it was convenient. But do that go, how can I give away so much value that people would want to pay me and make that, make that your posture make that, make that your prayer make that your position in the marketplace make that your reputation and, and just, and just watch. So again, those are, those are the takeaways, love this story, you know, congratulations, Lisa USA today, national bestseller, radical confidence is the book, pick it up, you know, take a, take a look if you haven’t gotten it. RV (28:02): Really, really awesome. It’s, it’s endorsed by Jay Sheti and Mel Robbins and Dr. Nicole lap, like all these really modern day, you know, thought leaders, the thought leaders of future of our generation, like really, really cool. And then the other thing is go to, if you go to double dot brand builders, group.com, check out this, this full free training that AJ put together about how do you double your business in 12 months. And then, you know, that brings me to the fourth takeaway, which, you know, I wanna tell you about is we, it’s hard to build a personal brand. Like it’s, it’s hard to be an entrepreneur in general, right? Like you gotta do the marketing, you gotta do the sales, you gotta do the delivery, the customer service, the accounting, the HR, the legal, the strategy, the operations, like the finance, like it’s hard to be an entrepreneur. RV (28:50): And that’s one of the reasons why our heart is for so many entrepreneurs. And you know, anyone who builds a personal brand, then it’s like, yeah, you gotta learn, you know, content creation and presentation skills and social media and branding and color design and graphic design and, and, you know, paid traffic and all the things we teach podcasting, right? Like all of the things in our whole curriculum. And so it’s, it’s not easy to make money in the midst of all of that. You actually have to create content and you have to go, man. I started out just wanting to impact lives. I just wanted to help people. And now I have to do all this other stuff that like gets in the way between me impacting lives. Like I have to do all of these things in order to just get to impact lives and, and to be able to make any money, right? RV (29:36): Like you have to take care of all that stuff really, before you make money and you create content. And so one of the things that we realized and, you know, our, the feedback from our community’s been awesome is that our content is really, really good, really, really solid and really powerful. And so one thing we’ve never done, we’ve never done this in our career. We are just doing it now is we have started a content licensing program where you can actually you pay a fee it’s moderate, very moderate. You pay this fee. And then what’ll happen is you get a, you get trained on how to use our content to help people find their uniqueness, build their personal brand, established their position in the marketplace. All of these, you know, these things from our, from our flagship brand builders group curriculum, and we give you the content. RV (30:29): So you can then you know, like when you become, when most people become a client, we’re taking you through the content to apply it to your own life. This is a program that we have now launched called content licensing, where we are giving you permission to take our content and go out into the world and sell it. And you can make as much money as you want from teaching our content. And you get, you know, the legal authority and the, and the right to do it. And we actually, not only that we train you how to do it. So you, you’re paying just, just a, a very moderate licensing fee in order to be able to use our content and go tell it to the world. And, you know there we give you the tools, right? We give you PowerPoints, we give you you come through the training, we teach you how to teach it to other people. RV (31:15): And you get all of these resources that are assets to help you, you know, have this sort of off the shelf service that you can, you know, either, you know, do as a do as a business, or in most cases, just make it a part of your business. It’s specifically for like coaches and consultants. And if you’re interested in that, like go to license dot brand builders, group.com, license dot brand builders, group.com. And you can read about that and, and get more for more information if you want. And it’s just one more way. We’re trying to like help close the gap between where you’re at and money showing up in your bank account. Because it’s, it’s difficult and, you know, to practice what I preach here, the content is incredible. Like we have developed a systematic process to help people figure out who they should be, the rest of their life and what the calling is, what the unique calling is on their life and how they can turn that into a personal brand and to help them figure out what is their uncapable difference? RV (32:19): What is their uniqueness? What is their identity that only they can, the, the space that only they can occupy in the world and then teaching ’em how to make a bunch of money doing it. We, I mean, you know, has God inspired, like we believe this system was given to us, but like, it’s incredible. And we’ve now taken 600 people more than 600 people through the process, you know, and a lot of ’em are these really great clients that, that you hear of that we work with. So anyways, go to license dot brand builders, group.com. If you wanna read up about that and just switch on, right, switch on, be proud of what you, you do, be proud of how you can help, you know, don’t, don’t try to get, make people just, you know, worship you and idolize you and fall in love with you and tell them how great you are. RV (33:08): That’s pride self-confidence is telling people how awesome this tool is. This service, this technique, you know, that you have this solution to solving their problem, and you can do that boldly and daringly and almost provocatively and aggressively and powerfully and go out and tell the world, be an ambassador, right. Be an ambassador of the problem you solve and be an ambassador of the solution that you have that can actually transform lives, flip that switch. And I promise you’ll double your business. Like that is what makes it possible. Don’t flip that switch, and I promise it’s about impossible to double your business. So hopefully you’ve enjoyed this. Check out the full training with AJ at brain builders, group.com and keep coming back here week after week on the influential personal brand podcast