RV – Hey Brand Builder welcome to this special recap edition of the influential personal brand podcast I am joined by my wife and business partner CEO Brand Builders Group, AJ Vaden to give you our famous three and three recap and this is a special interview for us because Lewis Howes is someone who has become a business partner, a client and a truly dear friend. I thought AJ might start by just sharing a little bit of a behind-the-scenes clip of why he’s so important to us personally. Well as our boys call him, Uncle Lou Lou.  For anyone in business or who’s in life for that matter, need someone who pushes them and believes in them and myths of chaos and that is exactly what Lewis did for us. There was a very sudden departure between us and our former business partners and our former business. Divine intervention God placed Lewis in our lap during a very unique time a very challenging time for us and it was just a really interesting thing where it’s like you don’t really know what your next move is but someone says I do and this is it and literally he said those words this is your new thing and he pushed us towards it he believed in us he was like this has got to be it and then on top of that he was like I believe in this so much I’m gonna help you I’m gonna have you on my podcast I’m gonna email my list I’m gonna introduce you to my top level mastermind I’m gonna tell people they need to do this and between losing to very high figure incomes overnight starting over from scratch losing our social media not sure about an IP a lot of other things that happen over a six-week span Lewis single-handedly helped us launch our new business. I can very confidently say if it hadn’t have been for Lewis I don’t know where we would be today yeah I don’t know if Brand Builders Group would be it I don’t know this company I don’t I really don’t know and it was I really believe it was divine intervention I believe that God put him in our path at that very unique time and said we knew him but not in the way that we do now and he needed our help and we wouldn’t have had the capacity to help him I’m will  forever be endeared and grateful and appreciative to Lewis and to Matt for their help in helping us launch Brand Builders Group but more than that what I’m so really eternally grateful for is someone who believed in us when we were kind of at the bottom of the bottom feeling a little lost a little unsure and they were like so sure of this is what you have to be doing this is your next job this is your business. And if you don’t believe in you the way that I do then let me help you let me prove it. Let me promote this let me bring you on the podcast and let me let me help you and that’s really what he did and he was a huge part of the launch and the success that Brand Builders has had so expeditiously because of him Yeah and the time that this interviews is coming out , like those of you that are keeping up with this in the life, Lewis just had us back on the podcast again recently so you should go listen to that I believe it’s episode 670 and I think the other episodes maybe 883 but so it was cool to reverse roles and get a chance to interview him. I think one of the big points that segues is very much from what AJ the story that AJ was just kind of sharing is that one of the things that he said in this interview was he said you have to build meaningful offline relationships in order to build a large online following and that really hit me in a very real way and he wasn’t really talking about us specifically but even as he said that it was like wow had we not had this offline relationship that we had developed for years and we never wanted anything from Lewis we were just there to help him and support him and then all of a sudden that offline relationship it became a pivotal a pitiful thing for us that’s a really great point and Lewis. I think is one of those unique people that spends a lot of time and his DMS he spends a lot of time engaging and interacting and commenting and he’s like he’s truly looking at what people are saying and how to engage and like he’s truly working to build a relationship which i think is also why he has a strong following he’s got millions of downloads a month in his podcast it’s it work right it’s not magically happening because he’s posting bunches of cool pictures even though he is and we’ll talk about that yeah um but he’s working like he’s building relations working at building the relationship like that takes a lot of time and intention and effort and he’s doing it and it doesn’t just happen because you make a lot of posts it happens because you engage in what he’s saying is offline and online I would say that is Lewis’s true superpower he didn’t say that here but you know we’ve had that conversation with him we work very closely if you can’t tell with him and Matt and have for the last couple of years behind the scenes and he talks about that on the interview where he interviewed me recently of how much we’ve you know made a difference with them but I think his superpowers these offline relationships. Another thing that he does really well you just talked about AJ was the photography so share some of your thoughts about the highlights of what he was saying related to using photography not just to showcase pictures of yourself but to really create an emotion that people fall in love with that people want to feel and it’s using photography to really a moat the feelings of your personal brand so it’s like if you think about your personal brand what emotion should people associate with it right and I think if you look at his a lot of it and this is just my interpretation but if I just go through and scroll through all his pictures a lot of it is adventure and freedom and aspiration and inspiration and motivation and success and victory and overcoming the odds and I think too there’s just there’s an element of intrigue and curiosity and inquisitive nature of seeing different things and doing unique things and I think those in itself kind of just to me It’s like it’s a little bit of adventure both for yourself and actually experiencing new parts of the world as well as learning new parts of yourself which he talks a lot about and I just love that and never really associated the importance of high quality photography with the amount of impact that that has but clearly it’s a prime example of how that has really made an extraordinary difference in his personal brand and it’s probably not something that we have done well and I know this would be at least for me I would say this is something I have never even thought about like this is the for him to describe it as such a major part of his strategy for someone of his level and for him for me to go I’ve never even thought about the power of photography it’s like something I do once every couple years to like update a headshot but for him to say this is this is the primary mechanism that I use to convey the emotion that is my brand that when people look at this imagery that they enter into the state that I want them to be in when they think of greatness It just blew my mind and because of the value they place on it you know him and just let you use lots of different photographers but Nick OnKen who’s another Brand Builders client and someone that is one of our kind of recommended vendors and I have some imagery that Nick has shot for me which I absolutely love but they literally planned trips around the world to capture three images like they will go travel for a week and orchestrate all the stuff you know to get a couple shots and that is just amazing general to the importance with all of your marketing that you’re you’re conveying an emotion and just being intentional and being intentional about it the next best headshot and throwing some text overlay on it That’s not it it’s about what do you want people to feel when they think about your personal brand that’s it does your imagery and photography actually align with that and I think that is the essence of something that was really unique and you won’t hear from any other interview yeah never it’s very distinct and so the other thing that Lewis said in this interview which was crazy to me I’d never heard him say this and all the interviews we’ve done the backstage the work he’s been to her house several times and we’ve been to his place working on like we work pretty closely with him and Matt and their team I’ve never heard him say this until this interview that one of the most important things that a personal brand can do is every year create one or two big moments and as soon as he said that I thought oh my gosh that is so key and in the big years where we’ve had big jumps in our speaking fees and big jumps in social media following and like just sort of big jumps and media or whatever it’s because we have had these moments but we just sort of stumble upon them as they show up and this is something that yeah I mean I mean you know you plan a book launch but you don’t plan to go it’s gonna be my thing this year and I’m gonna have another one next year and one the year after and Lewis is going every every year there’s got to be a moment. What do you think he meant well like how did you interpret the concept of a moment what do you think he’s talking about there to me I just think it’s something that people can associate with you in that year right it’s like if you’re constantly being associated with something that you did one year to year five years ten years ago which is very in line with my personal brand I’m a little bit you become irrelevant right At some point your content is a little dated right your photography is dated you’re dated you can’t be banking the future on what you did in the past and it’s that importance of reinventing and staying relevant and being forward-thinking and to me it’s like as soon as I heard that I was like yeah this is a concept of constant reinvention which is what I’m really passionate about and it’s focusing on like the best I have to give is ahead not behind me and it’s also taking time to celebrate the moments that you have in those years and saying and this is the best made today and next time it’s gonna be the best me now not well my glory days were behind me you know high school football college football or whatever it was in the past it’s like no no no my glory days are still to come so you just wait to see what happens next. Love it those are some those are some tweetable bombs right there from wifey I think you captured personal brand summit yeah like this is one of our moments one of our launches for this year as it turns out we have at least one thank gosh well we did launch a company but the summit the summit which then became this podcast that you’re listening to now yeah it was our big moment for 2019 yeah oh yeah I guess we launched the company in 2018 yeah I think again it’s just having those things where it’s like the whole team rallies around like this is a big launch and this is a defining moment of who we are in this year but I agree it’s like you do need to have those otherwise you look back and it’s like man you’re kind of just doing the same ol same ol, you’re not reinventing and you slowly become irrelevant as technology is just moving everyone at the speed of light yeah you got to kind of keep up yeah and I think in in the in our take the stairs book we talk about a concept called the harvest principle that you have to have these seasons of intensity to create the next breakthrough and that’s like what this is it’s like you have to a book launch or a new podcast or a new product or you know a new funnel like our summit funnel which wasn’t really selling anything was just giving away a ton of value but it’s like this moment where all of the resources align and there’s a reason to talk to the media and you create this like big boom and that’s literally how you break through and the level so anyways you know. Lewis we love you we’re so grateful for you and I hope you listening that you got so much out of the interview of just seeing his heart and also you know some not I would say not so commonly heard strategies that that are obviously things that he does really Well I agree and I would also say this entire debrief, this recap all I could focus on was how much shorter Rory is than me and why do I look enormous like Amazon woman Sorry, I shrunk my chair all the way down so that we were … Amazon you’re statuesque baby tall that’s us my beauty. That’s what we have for you today Brand Builder go out make a difference. Your message matters we believe in you we’ll catch you next time.