Author: Kailey Sullivan

Ep 77: Getting Your Slice of the Personal Brand Pie with Chris Harder | Recap Episode

RV: (00:06) Hey, brand builder. Welcome to the recap edition of the influential personal brand podcast. I am joined by my wife and CEO and business partner. AJ Vaden, we’re breaking down the Chris harder, which Chris and Lori have that in common with us, that they work and do business together. It’s pretty rare. It’s pretty rare. So we’re sharing our top three highlights three and three. AJ you go first, babe? Well, this isn’t necessarily whatever AJV: (00:36) My highlights, but one of the things that I think is really important one of the things we talk about a ton at brand builders group is the importance of identifying what is your primary business model. And I think that’s one of the things that really makes brain builders group really unique in the marketplace is we’re not just a strategy firm in terms of what is your personal brand. And what’s your message. I think one of our real uniqueness lies in the fact that we focus a ton on the business side that’s our background RV: (01:07) Making money is AJ spiritual gifts. AJV: (01:10) But I think there’s so much that so many people talk about social media and websites and the visual identity and without a plan, none of that really makes you money. And that’s a real core competency of ours is how do you actually turn your brand into a business? And what I loved about what Chris talked about kind of throughout the entire interview is how they’ve leveraged direct sales you know, kind of just whole concept of how do you, how do you find what your primary business model is? And we talk a lot about that. We have an acronym for that page. We have a lot of acronyms here. But what I loved is he talked about how direct sales has the lowest point of entry, the lowest barrier to entry, but also has some of the biggest upsides. And if you’re not really sure what your primary boss business model is, or maybe you don’t have a secondary or ancillary, this could be a really great option for you to leverage because how I see a personal brand, as it relates to direct sales is really more of like attraction marketing. AJV: (02:15) It’s the fuel that happens on your blog and your podcast and social media is really attraction marketing as you as the face, but yet you’ve got this really great product and you’ve got the fulfillment, you’ve got the shipping, you’ve got the backend business, the infrastructure, the technology with that direct sales company. So it’s a really interesting component and I kind of will tie this into my first point. I changed my mind mid thought, but I just love that. And I think for anyone who is in direct sales, you need to listen to this interview and anyone who isn’t completely confident that their current primary secondary ancillary business model is going to make this a full time gig. You should consider direct sales and see what’s out there and see how that fits into your business model. That could be a really great one. And I just, I love that. AJV: (03:04) So my first point how that kind of connects is the difference between a personal brand and what he calls a media brand. And I loved this as it relates to a podcast and he shared this example that I thought was really kind of aha. It’s like, are you building your audience to be big enough so that you can sell just your coaching program or your consulting or your speaking, or your course, or are you trying to make it big enough that you can get ads and sponsors and brand deals. And that to some degree is the difference between a personal brand and a media brand. And I thought that was very insightful because we have clients on both ends of the spectrum and they have a really solid like, Hey, I want to build a coaching business. I want to build a mastermind. I want to build a course. I want to do live events. And for that, you don’t need millions and millions and millions of followers, right? RV: (03:57) In particular was the permission to say, you don’t have to have millions of followers. You can make money from a brand, from a personal brand. And to think about the media brand AJV: (04:08) A totally separate. Now, if you’re trying to get ads in sponsors and brand deals, different story, but is that really your business model? And I think that just even having that filter as you’re making these decisions to help, you know, like, what am I doing this for really makes an extraordinary difference of what I know one of yours is not comparing yourself to the person who has millions, because you don’t have to, because you don’t have to mail. You don’t have to have millions of followers to make millions of dollars. RV: (04:41) That’s my point. Oh, I love that. Well, yeah. So I’ll, I’ll go right off of that, because that, that was part of the conversation about the comparison game. And I think, you know, it’s easy to be like, well, I don’t want to start a podcast cause I don’t think I can get millions of people or go, well, my podcast is an important cause I only get a few thousand downloads a month and, and the point is like, no, millions of downloads does not equal success. It all depends on what the strategy and the purpose is. You may only want a thousand people listening and it’s like, but it’s the right thousand people that are listening and he’s extremely targeted. And I would say that there’s a lot of people who make more money from a targeted podcast. That’s like the right thousand than just a broad one that reaches a ton of people, but there’s no clear monetization strategy. And you know, what w what he was saying specifically on the comparison game that spoke to me was if you’re gonna play the comparison game, play the full comparison, meaning you can’t just look and, and you mentioned. Yeah. And, and him and Laurie, I also thought it was interesting to your point about the direct sales that they still to this day draw a lot of income from their, their direct sales business, which really was years and years. AJV: (05:57) And it’s been the launching pad for all the other, RV: (05:59) For everything. Yeah. And, and, you know, I got, I got a big part of my start in direct sales and, and, you know, my mom was in direct sales. I’ve grown up in the whole direct sales world and we speak a lot to direct sales companies and just, just love the love of the business and the people. But if you’re gonna play the comparison game, just keep in mind that when you see somebody that has a million followers, there’s hours and hours and hours of work that they have done to get there, that you don’t see. And I think a lot of our clients, when they become brand builders group clients, and they see us breaking down the content diamond and the relationship engine and the funnels and all of the things that we teach about how to do it, they go, wow, there’s a lot of work here. And it’s like, yeah, it doesn’t just happen by accident. And you should give yourself permission to just like, be like, to be okay with where you’re at and don’t compare your, your step one to someone else’s step 77. AJV: (06:56) Yeah. I love that. So my second point was something that we talk a lot about Cod the fastest path to cash, but Chris also kind of referenced that. And he said, I know, I know dozens, if not hundreds of people who have launched their personal brand and made six figures in the first year. And I also know people that it’s taken them five years to make six figures in just their personal brand. And I thought it was really interesting. And I think a lot of it has to do with what is your primary business model? What are you selling? Because if what you are selling is a $10,000 membership program that lasts a year, you don’t need a ton of clients. You just need the right ones. You need a targeted audience with a very clear offering to the right people at the right time at the right price. AJV: (07:46) And if you sell 10, you’re kind of at six figures versus if you are launching a hundred dollar, of course, it’s a volume business. So what is it that you’re selling? And if you’re going all in and launching your personal brand, it’s keep that in mind. It’s what are you selling? Doesn’t have to be the long game or the, the, the end of it. Doesn’t have to be what you do for the long term. It’s just, what are you doing now to play the long game, knowing that your business model may shift over the course of time. And there may be things that you have to do right now that you don’t want to do a year or two or five years from now. But you know that you’ve got to kind of pays the path to get there. You’ve got to build your audience. AJV: (08:31) You’ve got to build your content. You’ve got to build your platform. And I just thought that was really interesting of well, but two people could be both launching a personal brand, have the exact same platform, the exact same number of followers, but just because their offering is different, one is going to make a lot more money quicker than the other. And I think all of those things, and I don’t think building a personal brand is about money. However for many of you you do have to make money. So I think that’s important to talk about and to reference. And I just really thought that was a very interesting concept. And one to keep in mind as you’re making these decisions of what should I launch and how should I launch it, and when should I launch it and what do I want to do short term, and what do I do longterm? And RV: (09:18) That reminds me of a time. One time I shared the stage with Jesse Itzler Sarah Blakely’s husband. And he was, you know, they’re both super wealthy and successful independently. And he was telling the story, I forget the name of the company is maybe net jets, but as a private jet, it was a private jet company. And he said, the reason that I got into that business, as I figured out, it would take me the same amount of work to sell like a hundred customers, a a hundred thousand dollar product, as it would take to sell a hundred customers, a $10 million product. And so I realized that if I could just go get a hundred customers, I might as well just get the higher price point and just go for a few customers. And I didn’t, I didn’t have to be the guy that had 10,000 customers or a million customers. I only needed like a hundred to turn this thing into a billion dollar business. And you know, that’s, to what you’re saying, the price point selections is important. And that’s a big part. I think, of phase one that a lot of our clients do struggle with. Cause they don’t think so much about the money part or look at it at scale, like you’re talking about of what is it like the longterm? AJV: (10:25) Yeah. I think so many people see a personal brand just of what you see on social media. And that’s such a teeny tiny, very last thing you do part and there’s so much work and thought and strategy that goes in beforehand. And that’s why I loved Chris’s interview is it talks a lot about the things, not just the podcast and the, and the brand deals and social media, it’s all the other infrastructure that has to be in place. RV: (10:47) So the biggest takeaway for me, which was my second with Chris, which I loved was he said, ego is your greatest overhead. I just loved that. And that is tweetable moment. That’s a pillar point as we would teach and that concept y’all have that ego is the thing that holds you back because it’s the thing that keeps you scared and keeps you worried and like keeps you stuck is because you’re afraid it won’t be good enough. And it will, you know, whatever you’ll face criticism. It’s also the thing that keeps us from scaling because we’re so focused on ourselves and we’re, we’re not just serving our audience and helping them. And I just thought that was super powerful. And if you’re stuck in any, in any form or fashion, as it relates to the business, it’s like, God, ask the ego question. Who am I thinking about? And who am I producing content for? And how am I making decisions every day? Is it for me? Or is it for the best interests of are our customer? And that’s just, that was strong. Ego is the greatest overhead AJV: (11:54) That is strong. Alright. My third point, I’ll make it short and sweet of just this whole concept of, you have to know where the trends are heading and if you’re not creating them, you need to at least know where they are, because they’re all relevant to you. If you’re building a personal brand and he used the example of social media and he said it, you know, it kind of, if you look at the evolution of where people are going and what people are doing, it went from MySpace to Facebook and Facebook to Instagram and Instagram now to take top. And we were just having this debate before we started the interview. And I’m like, yeah, just, I started really like Ted talks on my thing and does it really have to be my thing to have a presence on there? And is that where the trends are going and what’s it going to look like in one to five years, but to just say, that’s not my thing, I’m going to ignore it really. It’s probably a little bit negligent. If your business is in the business of personal branding, so it was a good aha moment for me. RV: (12:51) We did ignore Snapchat though. We made a conscious decision to ignore Snapchat and that worked out well. But what we didn’t do was go all in on stories yeah. At the time, which is what we should have done, which was like, okay, AJV: (13:04) Again, it’s all about just, you gotta be in the know, and that takes time and research. And just knowing what’s out there, it’s like, if this is your business model, make it your business and it’s your business to know what’s going on. Yeah. RV: (13:17) Be where the people are on that note. So one thing our team shared with us this morning is, is they saw something that apparently Instagram is about to start on rolling ads on IgE TV posts. So that’s a new thing that’s coming. That’s more of a, what we would call a phase three conversation about paid traffic. But if you’re listening and you know, you, you know, our lingo and phase three, and you’re in that paid traffic section, that’s a big time, big time win because if someone’s watching HGTV, that’s a super fan. And so the idea to be able to run ads to those people is yes, powerful, powerful. So be on the lookout for that. My last thing you know, is what Chris was all about is this thing is all about generosity and just giving. And he’s such a giver him and Lori, they’re always doing sponsor your, to like contests and sponsoring small businesses and giving them money to help them start. RV: (14:09) And they’re just really awesome about that. But I think he, you know, he said, it’s the key to everything. One it’s good for your heart. But the other thing is, as a business strategy, it creates massive reciprocity. And even it doesn’t mean you have to be given away a thousand dollars sweepstakes every week, but you’re giving away your ideas. You’re giving away your knowledge. You’re giving way education, encouragement, insight information. And that creates the law of reciprocity when you give to people. And that’s the power of podcasting and YouTube and all social media and email is that you can give, give, give, give, give, give, and it’s like, you can’t lose you. You can’t, outgive, you can’t, outgive the universe. If you just focus on giving away an amazing experience and everything, you know, it’ll come back to you. And we call this the rule of 10. RV: (15:04) When we talk about pricing in phase two, when we work on your offer structure, and the rule of 10 is, is when, when you’re setting your price, set the price at a rate where you feel confident that you’ve already given away 10 times the value for free as what you’re asking them to pay right now. So by the time they even see a price from you, if it’s a hundred dollar product, the person is literally going, I’ve already gotten a thousand dollars worth of value. And we shared this on a webinar a couple of weeks ago, the rule of 10 and somebody in the comments wrote, and I love this. They said the rule of 10 takes all the slime out of internet marketing. And that’s exactly what we’re talking about is just generosity. Create the law of reciprocity, like test it, try to give away everything. RV: (15:56) You’re not, you know, and see if it doesn’t just come pouring back in to your business. And so Chris just nailed that on the head for me. So that was, that was it’s great interview. God, listen, SP you know, if you’re, if you’re in any kind of network marketing, direct sales, for sure. These guys are superstars, they turned it into a whole media empire. An awesome, awesome couple, although Laurie’s not there. We’ll get Laurie we’ll we’ll, we’ll rope her in to come and do an interview too. So thanks for being here and we’ll catch you next time. Bye.

Ep 76: Getting Your Slice of the Personal Brand Pie with Chris Harder

RV: (00:00) Man, I have to tell you that I have been so impressed with the man you’re about to meet, Chris Harder. And it’s the generosity of this guy’s heart that blows me away. I would say it’s his generosity and then it’s his humility in terms of how much he still to this day invests in his own personal development. I met him in a very high-level mastermind. He runs masterminds though. I mean, this is a great example of the guy that is usually teaching is still also always learning. And him and his wife, Lori, are just incredible individuals. We, we’ve gotten to spend some time with them. AJ adores them. And this is someone who’s just built a personal brand. Him and his wife both have monster personal brands. They built it from the ground up. They’ve done it right. RV: (00:47) And he offered to come on and, and, and share. I, and I asked him to come on and be like, Hey, can you share some of those secrets? So his podcast is called for the love of money. That is, you know, probably his, his biggest platform he’s got like a quarter million people on Instagram at the time of this recording as well as a lot of lot of people. And I think, you know, but beyond that, it’s just entrepreneurship and success in general and really more of the heart of, you know, what it takes to succeed as both a personal brain and an entrepreneur. So Chris, my brother, welcome to the show. CH: (01:23) Hey Rory. Heck of an introduction. Thank you for that. And let me just say I echo all of those kinds of thoughts right back to you and AJ and just think the world of you guys. RV: (01:32) Well, thanks brother. I yeah, it’s been, it’s been fun for us to kind of, as we’ve shifted more from like the corporate world into more of the entrepreneurial world the last couple years and then also starting my personal brand over, like really getting into the space and seeing what people have been doing. And you were one of the first people that kind of popped up on my radar and in my feet and I was seeing around. And I would love to just, so being that you are a money guy and you talk about money and gratitude and generosity and giving and accumulating and, and, and, and investing from a personal brand perspective, are you open to just share with us? Like how do you actually make money? Cause I think that’s just a question people still have. It’s just like there’s so many different ways to make money. What actually pays your bills every day, CH: (02:19) Every week. Yeah. What a great question. Okay. So this, and I love that you’re all about personal branding because what I’m about to share all comes from one central piece and that is the personal brand, right? So as of today, when we record this, we have sole ownership or partial ownership in seven, I’m sorry, eight different seven and eight figure businesses. So some of the obvious ones for us where the revenue streams come from is my brand with the podcast underneath that, I call that a coaching brand. So there’s a media brand or there’s a coaching brand, right? So even though the podcast is a form of media underneath that we monetize it through e-courses, through two different masterminds, through one on one coaching and through events that we throw. Then under Lori’s brand I would say is more of a media brand because she’s monetizing her podcast through sponsorships and affiliate deals and things that are a little bit more traditional. CH: (03:14) When you build up things with the intention of media behind it, and we can get into that later. The difference between a media brand and a personal brand, I mean that’s a great like and it’s important for people to understand that distinction because podcasting is one of those things that people go, well, my business model is podcasting. And it’s like, well no, podcasting for most people is a traffic source. Your real business model, like what you’re saying is courses, masterminds, coaching events. In the case of Laurie or Lewis house or you know, people like that, Jordan harbinger, their business model actually is podcasting cause they’re doing brand deals. They’re monetizing the podcast itself. That’s cool. That’s an important distinction. So I love that. Well, it’s a, it’s a very important distinction for this reason. When you’re building something, even though we’re all doing it, let’s say through a podcast, it really helps you decide, do I need to build a large enough podcast in order to sell the number of coaching programs I need, whatever fashion it is, or do I need to build this podcast to the size and attraction to sell brand sponsorship deals? CH: (04:17) And those are two very different sets of mechanics behind the scenes, right? So what we’ve done is we’ve built these personal brands and think top of funnel. So pop two large podcasts feeding into Instagrams and Facebooks and mailing lists. And then we’re able to leverage those large brands to do things like investor deals in outstanding foods and investor deals in a tech company and investor deals in a vegan what do you call it? Coffee creamer company. And we’re able to also leverage it into, we built a huge network marketing team because of it was easier with personal brands. We’re able to pivot into an alcohol company that Lori has started all because we have audience. And when you think personal brand worry, you really got to think constant audience acquisition and interaction because if you master that you can pivot and build whatever you want. CH: (05:14) Mm. And, and the, so which came first? Like did you have the audience first or did you build a business first and then you took that money and use it to build the personal brand? Like what was the sequencing of how, you know, and now it’s, it’s sort of like, you know, we talk about she has wall, I know you’ve heard us talk about that. Most of our paying clients will know what that is, is like you guys are on the other side of the wall. And, and I think of ’em, you know, you’re focused in terms of what you spend your time on, but when you move to investing, it’s different. You’re not spending your time on it as much. It’s more of just you’re putting your money there. So what was this one? Do you agree with that last part and is that how you think about it? CH: (05:54) And then what was the order of how it kind of happened? Yeah, that’s, that’s exactly how it happened is you need to really go deep and specific in one category first until you break through that she hands wall to use your example and then you’ve kind of earned the right to expand off of that. So where our first large audience came from was Lori’s fitness brand. It’s really funny that we’re recording this while we’re kind of facing this pandemic crisis economy because I was thrown into entrepreneurship, which by the way, I always wanted to be in any ways during the last financial crisis, 2000 interesting. I came from banking and of course that was a banking crisis and Lori and I were young and arrogant and ignorant. We thought that it was going to last forever. And so we did not take care of our money. CH: (06:38) And when the music stopped, Rory, we had to get rid of it. Everything. And I don’t mean like kind of getting rid of everything. I mean we had to short sell the home that we had just finished building. We had to get rid of the cars, the investment properties. And the most humiliating part was this. We had to put every possession on Craigslist and watch his car after car pulled up in front of the house and person after person walked into the home and they would bargain for the couch and bargain for the chairs and bargain for the TVs and the grills, whatever they wanted. And they would walk out while the neighbors looked on in judgment with our possessions. But do you know what that did? Worry that moment that felt so horrible while it was going on? I felt so humiliating while it was going on. CH: (07:26) That was the moment that actually allowed us to downsize into a tiny little 900 square foot apartment and decide again, choose again, pivot and reinvent again. And so without that back against the wall moment, we went to started building personal brands. Now here’s why I share that story. I don’t care where you’re starting from. What do you already have a brand or whether you feel like you are below zero right now? The very first thing we did was Laurie had a gym at the time and she really had no career up to this moment. She said, I’m never going to let this happen again. So that’s when Lori rolled up her sleeves. And so she had a small gym, one on one studio that we built out on the weekends on her own, and she created the beginning of a monthly plan and she started competing in fitness and build a Facebook following. CH: (08:15) Now keep in mind we’re talking 12, no, 2009. I mean this is before everyone’s doing it, right? Yeah. And the minute it caught fire her, her Facebook started to grow quickly. She made an effort to put herself in magazines and I’ll, I’ll, I tell you what that has to do with today’s brand building in a little bit here. She made an effort to get herself in magazines, which at that time drove her Facebook and driving that Facebook drove her online workout program, which they were not a dime a dozen back then, like they are now. Right. And it was building that very intentional building of a Facebook audience and building an online revenue stream in addition to that gym that made us really take off and realize that this is what we wanted to do from here on out. And at the time Roy, I was a partner in a mortgage bank. Yeah, you’re right. So I left the bank that laid me off and I took a partnership in a mortgage bank and I took for the wrong reasons. I took it cause I was scared and, and I didn’t have a lot of other options. But when I saw what Lori was doing, I sold out my partnership because I said that’s what I want to be doing. I came home and I helped her grow that brand and we’ve never looked back ever since. RV: (09:28) Wow. Interesting. Yes. So you mentioned something there about not everybody was doing it right. And so to that your back against the wall, that’s an, that’s a powerful story. Cause I know for sure there’s, there’s somebody is listening right now that’s going through something similar to what you went through. CH: (09:50) Do you think it’s too late RV: (09:52) To build the personal brand? Like, like you said, workout programs are a dime a dozen. You have Facebook? Yeah. Is, you know, now it’s really Instagram and it’s even Instagram is like on the later part of its maturity cycle. Yeah. Like what do you think? It’s too late, do you think? Is there, is there a next thing? Do you think it’s just the same old tools and just kind of starting from ground zero? Like what, what’s your opinion on the life cycle? CH: (10:17) Cool opportunity here. I’m so glad you asked this. It’s never too late. Number one opportunity never goes away. It just changes shape, form and location. So it might change from Facebook. Actually, let’s be honest, if I changed from my space to Facebook and Facebook to Instagram and Instagram to tick tock now and but it’s always just changing shape and location and it’s our job as we’re building personal brands to always be aware of looking for how it’s changing and where it’s changing into and to go that direction. And so if you’re just starting a brand right now, you can not have thoughts of it’s too saturated or everybody’s already doing it because you’re going to do it differently. You’re going to have a little different swagger, a little different spin, a little different set of beliefs, a little bit different energy behind what you teach. CH: (11:06) And so even if someone has already started a similar podcast, even if they started a similar brand, even if they started a similar membership or similar mastermind, yours is going to be different and it’s going to speak to the people that don’t yet resonate with the ones that are out there. And here’s the most important point. If people are afraid that it’s too saturated, all you have to do is reel yourself back in and say, what is my financial goal? Great. Let’s pretend it’s, you know, a million dollars. Okay, how many customers do I need at blank dollars to make a million dollars? So we’ll say your program was a thousand bucks. Okay, you need a thousand customers at a thousand dollars to make that million. Okay, great. How many months do I have to do that? 12 months, so what do I really need to go out and get out of that gigantic slice of pie of potential customers? CH: (11:56) It’s something that is so minuscule to meet your financial goal that even if other people are doing it, there’s still more than enough to go around and that should be what makes you excited to go out there and just carve out your tiny slice of the pie. Yeah, I mean if you get a hundred customers a month, that’d be 1200 a year, but if it was a hundred a month, that’s 25 a week. So do you get 25 people a week? That’s five a day. You get five, five people a day. You’ve made an at a thousand bucks, you’re making a million dollars. Yeah, and there’s some, if you do a 10th of that, like if you do a 10th of that, for many people, you’re probably still landing in an okay place. Exactly. Yeah. I don’t want people to get caught up in a million dollar example. CH: (12:38) You want to make a hundred grand, then it’s just a hundred customers at a thousand or maybe a thousand customers at a hundred dollars there’s so many different routes to your goal, but the point is this, there, the number of customers required. It’s such a tiny percentage out of the whole pie out there. Then even if you’re starting today, there’s still more than enough to go around. You’re going to find enough customers that will resonate with your style and your teaching. Yeah, I mean a thousand. Yeah. You’re talking about a thousand customers. There’s however many 8 billion people on the planet. Like you only need a thousand. Exactly. Exactly. The other thing that’s crazy is like your thousand or probably, you know they’re already, they already, even though they don’t know about you, they are all gathered somewhere. Right? They’re all following somebody that’s like you and that because of digital marketing, like you can actually go get in front of those people fairly directly. CH: (13:32) Yeah, and Roy, I’ll also add this, it’s not like all consumer only chooses one brand or one person and ignores all the other ones. I always say people are junkies and I don’t mean like drug junkies. I mean it in a fun, positive way. People are junky. So the same person that loves Lewis house also wants to consume Jay Shetty and they also want to consume Tom, bill you and they also want to consume, you know, just the list goes on and on. So they don’t stop at one person. They consume as much as they possibly can. That’s what I mean by they’re a junkie self-development. A junkie is going to go get all the self development they can and entrepreneurial junkie is going to go get all the entrepreneurial guidance they can. And so if you are starting today and you’re bringing a fresh voice and a fresh spin and a fresh facade, it’s actually, you’d be welcomed. CH: (14:21) Bye. Probably millions of people who are saying, boy, I wish somebody fresh would come onto the scene because I’m already, let’s say a use to following these, these individuals I’ve already found. So you used the term junkie. So I want to talk about that because one of the things that I think it’s interesting like that we have a family member who refers to what AIG and I do as a Hocus Pocus. That’s what it’s, it’s not like in a negative thing. It’s more, it’s not like a demeaning thing. It’s more of like a, I don’t understand it. It’s just like this Hocus Pocus. And I, you know, like personal development and like the idea of a junkie I think over years is like I had somewhat of a negative connotation, but as my life has gone on, I go, gosh, the only thing that’s really different from where I am today and where I started raised by a single mother is I am a total junkie. CH: (15:17) I am the self-help junkie. Like I am the conference junkie. I’m the coaching junkie. And I don’t know if you would agree with this, but one of the things I feel like you and I have in common is I think you are too. I think you’re a junkie for sure. I mean, listen, I wake up in the morning and I have a rule that I must consume a book or I must consume, not a whole book, but I must consume pages of a book or I must consume a podcast as the first in first experience in my day. Right, and it’s because during the day, every single one of us, we’re going to consume a ton of propaganda. Yeah, and a regular individual who’s not a self development junkie, they’re just going to consume whatever propaganda falls in their lap. And let’s be honest, there’s a lot of negativity out there at all times. CH: (16:05) What if you are a quote, self-development junkie? Then that means instead of consuming any propaganda that falls in your lap, you are selectively choosing and seeking what I call positive propaganda, podcasts, books, YouTube channels. I’ll make you better courses, whatever it might be, and that positive propaganda, when that outweighs the negative propaganda and you’re able to consume, consume, consume. What it does is a couple things. One, it kind of chooses what colored lenses you’re going to see the day through, right? Number two, it kicks you back in the game quicker. Okay. A bad circumstance happens during your day. You’re not going to unwrap it if you know what to turn to or if you just got off a great podcast or something motivating, you now have the tools to handle that rock circumstance in a better way. And that means the outcome turns out more in your favor. CH: (16:56) And so I will take the label of being assaulted, self-development junkie all day long because it’s better than just consuming what happens to fall in my lap by circumstance out there. [inaudible] Yeah, I love that. So I want to tie this back to network marketing and direct sales a little bit cause that’s another kind of thing that we have a shared background of it at different companies. But a lot of our clients, that brand builders group and I, and I know some of the people in your masterminds, our indirect sales, how, how does, how do you use social media and personal branding and digital marketing? How have you guys used that? Cause you still draw some fair, some fairly significant income, right? From a direct sales company that you earn a residual residual income of over seven figures of a team. We started building 10 years ago. Wow. Yeah. RV: (17:51) So how do you, do you still, do you still actively kind of promote that using the tools of digital or is it more just like the fact that you’re out there and you, people meet you and they ask and they’re looking for opportunity and it just kind of comes up in conversation? CH: (18:06) At this point? It just falls in our lap. You know, people just see us or hear of us and by proximity, a lot of times they’ll just go sign up on our team. So we’re not very active in it anymore. But we spent a lot of years being wildly active in it. And I’ll tell you what, one of my favorite things about network marketing is this, and I want to talk about a quick, it gets a bad neck, right? Right. So, and this is coming from somebody who, number one used to totally judge it. I thought I would never do that in my life. Number two, we have so many different types of companies and so many different arenas that I’m not sharing what I’m about to share from being. This is my number one income source. I’m sharing this from the standpoint of in all the samples I’ve been a part of, I really stand behind this one opportunity and here’s why. CH: (18:52) So in my opinion, it is the greatest set of training wheels in order for entrepreneurship that you could ever like earn your coupon that you could ever learn that. And here’s what I mean. The barrier of entry in almost any kind of company is always very low. It’s something you’re consuming anyways, something you’d spend money on anyways, right? But the upside is limitless. You know, I know probably at least 200 different people from different companies that have made over seven figures, some eight figures in network marketing, right? So the upside is limitless. The barrier of entry is very low. And the entire journey from start to finish is one of self-development. It’s one, I’m learning sales, it’s one of learning marketing, it’s one of learning brand building and how to leverage it. It’s one of learning team building and money management all slowly and all in a way that you really don’t have anything to risk other than a little bit of self esteem and a couple of friends sometimes because that is probably the highest the biggest cost of entry is a few people will judge you in the beginning and if you can let your ego go, it’s a great set of training wheels to truly learn real entrepreneurship. RV: (20:08) Man, I’ve never heard that quite like that and I totally believe in what you’re saying. And the, the other in terms of the training wheels, the part that’s so cool. And you know, at this point we made it, we were out of all direct sales because I speak to so many of the different companies that I, I, we actually got it had to kind of move, move out of that. But I still believe that my mom, we just actively helped get my mom back into a direct sales company and she was at Mary Kay years ago when I was younger. But the other thing is you don’t have to build the product. Like, and even in a personal brand, like half the battle CH: (20:48) Is creating an amazing product. The other half is making sure a whole bunch of people know about it. Like in network marketing or direct sales. A lot of times the products are awesome. Like a lot of times you, you have this great shake or oil or makeup or you know, whatever the thing is, your workout program and you don’t have to do any of the product development, you just gotta go tell a bunch of people about it. How’s this for a real life example? I was like to lift the curtain and use ourselves, right? So if I were to add up all the money, we’ve made a network marketing over the years, it’s over 10 million bucks. Wow. We started for probably $200 worth of shakes that we tried back when we were saying I would never do this now for comparison, this drink, this beverage company that Lori is starting, we have over a quarter million dollars into lawyers, IP formulations, sampling trademarks, you name it. CH: (21:40) And we don’t even have a run of product yet. So how was that for like a comparison of barrier of entry compared to payoff if you are just joining a network marketing team in a very safe way to learn entrepreneurship as opposed to what it really costs to develop and launch any other physical product? Yeah, and, and I think, you know, this isn’t meant to be a commercial for network marketing by any means, but I, the thing that to me speaks so consistently about your story is one of humility of being, of being willing to do the things you know, to take the stairs is the metaphor that we use all the time of doing the things that no one else wanted to do and not being afraid of judgment and having your back against the wall and selling all your stuff off and then doing direct sales. CH: (22:30) And then I know for sure because this is true about every personal brand that you started a podcast, nobody was freaking listening. You were doing Facebook. Nobody was there like it’s easier now because you know that you’re actually impacting lives. But when you first start it’s like, well this happened to me. I shared this with somebody this week, so I just relaunched. I had to start over and I have a brand new YouTube channel. My video from this week has three views. Oh my God. One of them is mine. I’m pretty sure the other one is like the person on my team who posted the video. I’ll go watch it. You’ll have four dice. Yes. and as you listen, but it’s you and I are willing to do that. We are willing to have zero followers. We are willing to have three views. We are willing to take the stairs. CH: (23:22) We are willing. Two how other people look and say, Oh boy that looks like it’s failing because we know that we are in it for the long game and I think that’s where people go wrong. Well and back to network marketing or whether it’s traditional business or any other form of business. People dip their toes in and when they don’t have a a quick hit right away they say, see it didn’t work. If you know that you are in it for the long game. And listen, I had to teach myself years ago when we were losing everything. That Eagle will cost you more than anything else in life. Right? I’ve got a saying. It’s ego is your greatest overhead because ego will will cost you by speaking up when you shouldn’t. It’ll also stop you from speaking up when you should because you’re afraid you might look dumb. CH: (24:08) Eagle will burn bridges, it’ll burn relationships, it’ll make you miss opportunities and ego will stop you from building that YouTube channel or that podcast or that Instagram or that tic TAC because you’re so afraid that people are going to look and see that you have three views, which is such a silly, a silly thing too. It’s like even if you have three views, it’s like you say you want to make a difference in someone’s life. There’s three people you know too. Not counting yourself even as like you’re making a difference. Like so, so I want to talk about the time, cause you bring up the time horizon and that’s good. I think that’s important for people to understand too. So realistically here, how long does this take take to start? Like, and let’s talk about the personal brand specifically, right? Like podcasting, putting content on social, like whatever you want to call it, blogging, doing videos on YouTube, whatever. CH: (25:06) Like how long does somebody have to be willing to do it for before they go, yeah, it’s not working. I should pull the cord on this thing. Or you know, like give us in today’s world, cause I know, I know you have a lot of your students are kind of like brand builders group. A lot of ours are kind of starting in there earlier in their journey. So I’ve got a two part answer to this. The first part is don’t start anything that you don’t see yourself still doing and enjoying in three years. So don’t start that podcast, not started that YouTube channel. Don’t start that Instagram account unless you see yourself enjoying it three years from now and continuing to build it. And then the second part of that answer is you can monetize a small audience very quickly, but you shouldn’t hang your hopes on monetizing it in a large way. CH: (25:57) Very quickly and saying, if it didn’t work at first, I’m out. Right? Is it possible? Yes. Should you quit? If you don’t do it right away, Nope. You gotta have that longterm commitment. So I’ll give the example. I’ve seen people with a very small following, find 10 clients at $10,000, whether it’s a coaching or a mastermind and make a hundred grand in their first few months of business. That’s a very realistic scenario. I’ve also seen people work five years before they hit six figures, and there’s a lot of factors that go into it. How much effort are you putting into it? Are you willing to reinvest your revenue into hypergrowth or are you starting to use it as a paycheck? Are you good at collaborating and mixing it up with other people out there that can point their audiences back to you? Or do you feel like you’re going at it solo? I mean, these are all very important things that will affect how quickly you get to grow and how quickly you get to monetize. RV: (26:55) Yeah. That’s so, so good. And is so, so important. I think yeah, I mean, you just, you, you nailed it. And that’s the thing too. It’s like, it’s not how long have you been doing it? It’s also how much have you been doing it, right? It’s like there’s plenty of people say I’ve been podcasting for a year and it’s like you’ve released six episodes. That’s not podcasting for a year. That’s podcasting for a week, spread out over a year. That’s exactly, that is exactly. It’s like, for example, Laurie’s show like caught fire and is X exponentially larger than mine right now? I could get jealous or I could say, huh, guess it’s not made for me. CH: (27:42) Or I could look at where her hockey stick moment happened and say, mine is right down the road. I just gotta stay the course until my hockey stick moment happens as well. Because if you continue to, and I love what you said, not just do it for a long time, but how often, how much do you put into it while you’re doing it? If you continue to say I’m committed to both of those components, your hockey stick moment will happen, right? It will shoot up at some point. You get the right break, you’ll get the right follow where you get the right share, you get the right you know, episode that goes viral. But don’t stop short of that hockey stick moment just because somebody else has gotten there as, and you haven’t reached yours yet. RV: (28:21) Yeah, that’s good. That comparison thing is a real, I mean, that’s a real, that’s a real struggle to like, it’s just you’re always looking at how many followers do they have and how many downloads do they have? And that’s, yeah, that can be a discouraging moment. Yeah, I think it’s important to, if you’re gonna play the game of comparison and say, look how good someone else is doing, then you need to play the full game of comparison CH: (28:44) And look the other direction and say, wow, look at all the people that wish that there where I’m at. And by the way, I’m not an advocate of playing the comparison game, stay far, far away from it. But if you’re going to play it, you need to play both sides of the field. RV: (28:56) If you’re gonna look at this end zone and say, CH: (28:58) Not fair, look what they’re doing, look where they are. Then you also have to look behind you at the other end zone and say, Oh wow, people wish that they were at the 40 yard line at the 50 yard line like I am right now. RV: (29:08) Yeah, I love that. And I would also, I would also say that too, to that point of the full comparison, it’s like you can’t look at where Laurie is at today and go, okay, where am I compared to her? You have to go, how many total hours has she put in? How much heartbreak has she had? What is everything that she has been? What is everything that she has been through? And it’s like, I’ve done six episodes so far. Right, and you don’t, you don’t factor in that because you don’t see that part. It’s but, but it’s like, again, if you’re going to play the comparison game, play the game CH: (29:42) And remind yourself like there’s a whole story here. You can’t compare their chapter 20 to your chapter one, you’re, you’re so spot on because if you’re going to do that, you must seek out all the facts. So if I was looking at Lori compared to me some additional facts or this, she had a great big Facebook following that she worked hard to build long before I decided I wanted to build a brand. And then she had been kicking out three episodes a week while I was only kicking out two. And when I went to three, she went to four. Right. So she has been doing more longer and that is why she has exponential more growth than me. I can’t look at a timeline and say, Oh boy, at the three year Mark, you know, she was higher than I was. That’s not fair. CH: (30:29) Yeah. That’s one reason why she’s doing better than you. The other reason is because you and I both share the same problem with our wives are actually better than us and we have more charisma. We just got you know, we just have to live, we have to live with that every day. But sugar mama. I mean, that’s all I’m saying. Sugar, sugar, mama. You know what’s really funny? I do want to talk about that. When you find the right partner, when you find that right ride or die, that lifts you up when you’re down and you lift them up when they’re down. When you guys have complimentary skillsets, right? So my strengths are her weaknesses, her weaknesses are, and I should say her strengths are my weaknesses. When you can decide to make that work, Oh look out, you can accomplish anything at any level that you want. CH: (31:18) Right? And by the way, if you don’t have a partner, this is not an excuse. This doesn’t mean, Oh, see, that’s why it’s working for, for Rory and Chris is because they found great partners. So I guess I’m screwed. No, that’s not what the message is. The message is by yourself. You could do absolutely extraordinary. And when you find that right partner have been, it’s just like everything you’re trying to do amplified. Yeah, it can. Yeah. It can be right. I mean when you’re by yourself. And this was something for me that, you know, it was like I worked till midnight when I was single every night, like all the time, other than Thursdays and Fridays, like when I was in college and you know, like Thursday and Friday nights and maybe Saturday nights, but it was like four nights a week I was working like crazy because I didn’t have a responsibility to somebody else. CH: (32:08) And then when you get a partner, you know that can work for, you can also work against you. You get the wrong partner, you get the wrong business partner, you get the wrong relational partner, you know, that can also, you get the wrong vendor. Partnerships can accelerate or decelerate, but you know, like what you said, you’ll know you have the right partner if they lift you up when you’re down and you can pick them up when they’re down. And when you decide to work together, it’s like one plus one can equal four. Absolutely. Without a doubt. It’s, it’s, it’s just such a magical thing to find. I love it. I love it. I love it. I love it. So Chris, buddy, where obviously you’ve got the podcast, if people aren’t listening for the love of money where else would you direct people if they want to kind of connect up with you and see more about what you’re, what you’re up to. Make sure you follow Chris, not Lori because he needs the followers. She does. CH: (33:04) Here’s two great places to find me. I’ll find all my [email protected] and Instagram is a platform that I hang out on the most right now and I’ve made a commitment to answer every single business question that comes in. And sometimes it’s a daunting task, but, but I stick to it. So go find me there at Chris w harder. Yeah. alright buddy. So last little thing here. Right. Do you think that generosity is a necessity for a successful personal brand or do you think it’s an act, an accessory? Do you think it’s a necessity or is it an accessory to the success of a personal brand? What a great question. Absolute necessity. Here’s why. When you are generous in your relationships, then they’re going to using law of reciprocity, give you things back that will help you grow your brand. When you’re generous to your customers, then law of reciprocity is going to kick in and they’re gonna be more loyal and give you things back that helped your business grow. CH: (34:09) When you are generous to strangers, when you’re generous with your time, when you’re generous with your knowledge. For example, if you create incredible opt-ins, you’re generous with your knowledge for free. If you do amazing webinars for no charge and you’re being generous with your knowledge and your time, then those have exponential returns on growing your business. And here’s a real live a example. I do live webinars right now while we’re going through this crazy economy. I wanted a platform for people to be able to ask questions about their pivots. Right now it costs me, in other words, I’m investing two hours a night, three nights a week, so six hours of my life. Wow. I mean, that’s big. At the time that we’re recording this, I charge $4,000 an hour for my coaching. So, I mean it’s a big commitment, but what happens every time I hang up, when I’m done serving, when I’m done adding value, when I’m done, I’m like answering the questions and I’m on that great high cause I just got to help people, their businesses. CH: (35:07) I open up my Instagram and there are always, you know, when you click on your notifications, there’s the mentions by the way, this is what everybody should always be. Measuring on their Instagram is shares and mentions, not likes and comments, but the thing that says, mentioned the caps out at 99, every single time I’m done with the webinar, it’s capped out at 99 mentions, right? Screenshot. Wow. I just learned that screenshot. Wow. He just said this. Then your followers grow exponentially faster, exponentially higher because of all those mentions. And so that is a perfect example of if you are generous with your knowledge, if you’re generous with your time, if you’re generous with everything that you can be, then law of reciprocity kicks in in a real tangible way. Gosh, I love that. The whole freaking personal brand business is built on the law of reciprocity. CH: (36:01) It’s like you can’t outgive people like you. You can’t, you can’t give away. Everyone’s like, well, I can’t give that away cause then what do I sell them? And it’s like, it’s not how it works. It’s like you, you, you just, you give it away and it always comes back. It’s the craziest thing. Like this whole, this whole space who is invented and built upon and thrives because of that one single law, Roy giving is the secret to everything you want in every aspect of life. And listen, it’s counterintuitive. People think if I want to make more money or if I want to accumulate money, I need to save. But the answer is giving is a secret to everything you want. And here’s how I learned that. I’ve always actually had a generous spirit ever since I was a kid. You know, my parents grew up teaching me how to tip extra as a kid and they let me figure out the tip and they’d explain why we tip extra because that’s someone who left their family to serve our family. CH: (36:55) And then at church they would give us boys, my brother and I, the money to put into the offering plate and explain, here’s why we put a little bit more in than other people that you might see. And we weren’t rich growing up. It was just they wanted to teach us generosity. So I always had the spirit. But here’s where it really hit home for me. About five years ago, I read 30 books in 30 days. Laurie was on a rocket ship. I was just treading water in the good, good land of good. And I wanted to catch up the Lord. So I’m like, you know what, I’m gonna read 30 books in 30 days and halfway through those books, and by the way, all the books had different agendas. They were spiritual books. They were seven steps to this. They were autobiographies is how to do this. Didn’t matter. Do you only agenda was it had to T improve me in some way and had to be less than 300 pages so I could finish it? CH: (37:46) Exactly. So at the two week Mark, I remember being in bed, finishing a book I rolled over to Lorina said maybe you’re not going to believe this, but two weeks in so far, 14 out of 14 books, no matter what they’re trying to sell me, giving is the common thread through these things like giving us the secret to what they’re trying to sell me. And then I watched for that common thread and it held true through all 30 out of 30 books and of all the gifts that I got from taking on that little personal challenge, the number one gift was confirmation of what I kind of had a hunch up. And that is the more you give law of reciprocity will kick in and the more wonderful blessings you’re going to get back in different ways in life. Wow. Wow. My friends Chris, harder. RV: (38:36) This is the story behind the story that you see. We’ll have to see if we can get Lori on here sometime to get her part of this. Without doubt. I mean this is a, it’s just so awesome brother and I, I appreciate you sharing so transparently. You know, your mistakes, the failures, your insecurities, like your journey and and just kind of be at being a champion in the world for believing in people and encourage them to be generous and, and just modeling that generosity over and over and over again. Man, we just, we, we pray for you guys and we wish you the best. Well, well, thank you so much. I know how much your audience means to you, and so I really appreciate you giving me this platform to share those stories and share those mistakes and share those insecurities like the more people that, that do, that it gives other people permission to take that first step. So thank you.

Ep 75: Responding Versus Reacting to Injustice with Anton Gunn | Recap Episode

RV: (00:00) Hey there. Brand builder. Excited to bring you really a special edition here of the influential personal brand podcasts, a very unplanned, spontaneous we want to introduce you to a good friend of ours. I’m a client of ours, somebody who believes in us, somebody who we believe in tremendously. Somebody who we look up to. His name is Anton Gunn and he is a former senior advisor to president Barack Obama. And Anton is one of the world’s leading authorities on socially conscious leadership. So he has a master’s degree in social work from USC and was a resident fellow at Harvard. He is the bestselling author of the presidential principles and he’s been featured in time magazine, the wall street journal, BBC, NPR, and on good morning America. And as an international speaker and consultant, he’s worked with organizations like Microsoft, Sedexo, KPMG, Verizon, Aetna, Vanderbilt health and Boeing on and on and on. RV: (00:58) And so from playing sec football and being the first African American in history elected to the South Carolina legislature from his from his district early in his career to now working as a C level executive for an academic health system and serving on multiple boards. He has spent his life building or help helping people build diverse high performing teams and world-class leadership culture. And was this on our heart for you to hear from him about some of the things going on in the world and specifically how to use your personal brand to influence real change? And I’m going to let AJ say something cause she, I can, I can tell she’s bubbling. And you know, if you’ve listened to the show, you know that AJ does not often conduct the interviews. She does all the debriefs, AJV: (01:53) But since then RV: (01:54) This was, this one was right from AJs heart. So AJV: (01:57) Well they’ll say yes, Amazon has this really nice, fancy bio with all of this amazing accomplishments. But the real reason that I felt led to forced Anton to get on this call of us, which he was so happy to oblige so quickly, it’s honestly, he’s so representative of what we believe in as people and as a part of our, our community at brand builders group, we just believe like Anton comes from a place of real experience. So do you also comes from a place that he really believes in justice but also doing it in a way that actually creates change by using real influence because he’s doing things the right way. And that’s not easy. That’s actually really hard and it takes a lot of discipline to do things the the long way and that, but I just feel like you’re such a extension of what we believe in. And so thanks for, thanks for popping. AG: (02:53) Thank you for saying that. AIJ and I love you both. You are awesome. So happy to be a client. Happy to be your friend and happy to help you and all of your listeners and supporters understand that this is an important time for all of us to use our influence in authentic ways, in ways that we feel comfortable with, most importantly to help bend the arc of the moral universe more towards justice. And it already bends that way, but it requires each of us to do something in a way that helps to make things better. That’s what our responsibility to our leaders is to work, to make things right and every chance that we get. So I appreciate you creating the space for that and doing that and living up to who you are as individuals and as a business. RV: (03:39) Well, I love that Anton, and honestly we’ve struggled with what to say. I mean there’s a lot of things that I could say and kind of want to say, but don’t necessarily feel like they’re appropriate or you know, right on pace. I think that’s a lot of a lot of people. And, and, and like you said, as. AJV: (03:58) I feel like it’s so sensitive right now and being twisted and turned, and even with the best of intentions, it comes across as you’re ignorant. You don’t know anything. You don’t understand. Yeah, no, but that doesn’t mean we’re not trying. RV: (04:14) And, and I, I think, you know, when we reached out to you, we said, Hey, we don’t want to make this like a news media commentary on anything specific that’s happening in the news. But okay. You know, you’ve got a moral compass for fairness and justice. RV: (04:27) And I think one of the things that I struggle with, and I just wanted to ask you as your friend is, you know, there’s been a lot of stuff that says, Hey, you know, being silent as part of the problem, you know, silence, you know, basically if you’re silent, you’re racist. I don’t necessarily, that doesn’t necessarily connect with me. I don’t necessarily think that being silent means you’re racist any more than I think making a post will change the world. But what I am very interested in is what are the things productively that we can do? And that we should do like not just, not just using our voice, but what are the things that we can do. And you have such an interesting perspective from working in the white house to being, you know, a division one athlete to leading it in the healthcare world there. Yeah. AJV: (05:23) They’re all of these things, right? AG: (05:26) Yeah. So let me just say AG: (05:30) Know you gotta you gotta remember a leader’s responsibility is to respond and not react. And what do I mean by respond and not react? You know, whenever you’re in the heat of any kind of difficult circumstance, any kind of crisis, your emotions will get the best of you immediately. And what you see some people doing on social media are there emotional responses to what’s going on? And it’s not understandable for people to have an emotional response. Some people’s emotional response is to or emotional reaction is to lash out and scream at you for not saying anything. Cause if you’re not saying anything, then that means you must agree with the bad people who are doing bad things. Right. That’s a, that’s really a reaction. That’s not really a thoughtful prepared response. That’s a reaction. Some people’s reaction is because they’re so shocked by what they see. AG: (06:28) They freeze and they don’t want to say anything. I mean, we’ve all seen in circumstances you’re going to do three things. If you’re confronted in a crisis, you’re going to freeze, you’re going to fight, where are you going to flight any other direction? And I think what we have in the middle of any kind of crisis is that people freeze. Some people fight and others flight, and so I think the people who are fighting are the ones who are screaming out on social media. Some people are so distraught about what they see that they freeze and so that is sometimes silent. You’re when you freeze your assignment and some people could immediately assume because you’re not fighting like me. Oh, because you’re not running like me. Then that means you must agree with those who are doing bad things. That is not the case, but what you should do is be thoughtful about how you can have a positive point in the specs. AG: (07:23) How can you add to the construction of a solution and not to further destruction of the problem? And so what I tell people to do is first of all remain yeah. In your lane. And when I say remaining your lane is, you know, for the first 12 years of my career I actually was a community organizer. So I’ve organized protests, I’ve organized marches, I’ve done sit ins, I’ve actually hold politicians accountable for not doing the right thing. And that’s actually why I got into politics, because I got tired of politicians telling me one thing, but then doing the complete opposite. And I say, well, why am I asking you to do something that you clearly don’t have the capacity to do? Why don’t I just run for office and take your place? And literally that was my goal. But that’s not everybody. It’s not everybody’s name. AG: (08:15) Some people’s learning to say, Anton, you’re better to be out there on the front lines, but here’s what I can do. I have a hundred dollars and I’ll put it in a bail fund. So if you get arrested and go to jail, you can get out and go home to be with your family. Or maybe I’ll support your education campaign to teach people about what good policing policies are or what good environmental policy. So it doesn’t matter if it’s this current crisis or there’s other, some kind of injustice that exists. I will tell you this, we’ve had injustice in wrongdoing as long as we’ve had challenges in this country and around the world. I’ll give you an example of that is unfair and, but it’s something that everybody can relate to. The two of you decided to go out to dinner and you go to your favorite restaurant in Nashville and you’ve been waiting 90 minutes for a table and then my wife and I walk in five minutes in a manner of these sets us down at the best table in the house. AG: (09:16) But you’ve been waiting for 90 minutes now already. You know that that was wrong, that that was not right for me to be able to walk right in and sit down at a table where you’ve been waiting for 90 minutes. It doesn’t make you feel good. It doesn’t make you like the restaurant anymore because you felt that you were treated unfair. So the question is, what am I going to do if I learned that you’ve been waiting for 90 minutes, do I just keep my table and keep eating and say, you know what? Too bad, Roy and AGA, you had the weight, 90 minutes. What do I say to the maitre D? That’s wrong. I’m going to get up and I’m going to give them this table because they’ve been waiting for 90 minutes. And if you saw me sit down at a table, do you decide to storm out of the restaurant or do you just stand there and do nothing? AG: (10:05) You just accept that you know you lost the table. Or do you walk over to the maitre D and says, you know what? I don’t think it’s right. I don’t think it’s fair that we’ve been waiting for 90 minutes and we didn’t get the table that we asked for and you let somebody else have the table. Now the maitre D also has a choice and an option at that point. He can say, well, you’re just going to have to wait a little longer. Well, he can say, you know what, Roy J I’m sorry. As soon as our next table come available, I’m going to put you at the top of the list in all appetizers and a bottle of wine is on me. So in that situation, we all have the opportunity to respond or we could react, but the key is whatever it is, you want to be authentic to yourself. AG: (10:50) Where do you feel comfortable? And also when you have some expertise, because what I try to remind people is that we all have personal experiences in our lives that we can connect the dots to something else that’s going on. So you may not know what it’s like to be a black man living in America. I can count seven particular instances that I could have ended up like George Ford or Tamir rice or Eric Garner. All of them happened before the age of 27 Hmm. I did nothing wrong. I was a college athlete. I went to a gas station with my uncle to go in to just, he went to go get a bottle of Boone’s farm. Just tell you how long ago it was and I went in to play the lottery. You just connected with AGA. You might have more in common with Aja than you think. AG: (11:39) As it turns out, as it turns out you love boons Romney J yes, we all did. So we were leaving the gas station and out of nowhere, five police cars pulls up. They draw guns on us, they drag us out of the car, they throw us on the ground, he puts his knee in my back in accuses us of being a part of a game and doing a drive by shooting. We didn’t even live on that side of town, but my uncle worked at a restaurant over there and I caught the bus to his job. We got in his car and we’re driving home. We stopped by the gas station and this happened to me. So this is real for me, but it may not be real for you. You may never have experienced anything like that. But I would say you might know someone who has. AG: (12:28) And so in this time, I would say the first thing people can do if you’re trying to figure out how to use your influence, if you have people in your spear network, your friends with those people who you have in your cell phone, who you know might be feeling some kind of way about what’s going on, it’s okay to send them a text. We’ll make a phone call and say, Hey, listen, I don’t fully understand all of this going on. I don’t fully know what to do about any of this. But no, I’m thinking about you. And if you have people who follow you on social media, who you know fit that demographic, you can easily say, listen, Hey, I know you guys watch my pocket. You listen to my podcasts, you follow my feed. You’re on my list. I just want you to know for the interview who are affected by the current circumstances. I want you to know that I’m thinking about you. And I’m not sure what to do yet, but I’m trying to find out. [inaudible] AG: (13:19) We’re all going to be better because of this. And that’s the approach that you have to take is to say something, but you don’t have to have all of the answers because you don’t, you’re not an expert in that. This is about how to build a brand for a movement. Then they should definitely be talking to you, particularly if there’s a person leading the movement. But if this is just unrest or this is just community up uptick and outrage about things, you don’t necessarily have the lead dog role in this, but you can play a role. But first empathizing with people who might be experiencing it. And that’s what we all want. We all want someone to understand our pain, to understand what we’re going through. And you guys have done that just by creating the space and the opportunity. Second thing I was telling people, you are good at something. AG: (14:06) So some of us are great writers, some of us are great speakers, some of us are great at teaching people how to manage and deal with stress. So there are ways you can say, Hey, in the middle of the most stressful time that we might’ve seen in our lifetimes, here are three things. Things that you can do to lower your stress. That message becomes universal. No matter what your race, gender background is, that’s a universal way that you can help him make it. You provide people a way to say, listen, I want to create an outlet for people to be able to express themselves and let me provide feedback on how I can help you to channel that into something positive. Those are simple things or you can really start to do a little bit of research and say, who is working to make sure that injustice and unfairness no longer exists and how can I offer some free advice or some free counsel or free coaching session to help them through it. AG: (15:02) Now, that doesn’t have to be public at all. That can be very private, but it’s something that you can do too to add value and to be comfortable in your space. But speak to the times that we’re in because I do think Roy, there is a fear about the silence if, if it’s, if the silence goes on too long and people will assume silence is complicity. And so I don’t expect anybody in a emotional moment to react in aggressiveness or to jump right out and be a part of anything. Cause that’s what I’m not doing. I haven’t left my house. I still remember that we’re in the middle of a pandemic. And so I’m concerned about my health and my family’s health. So as bad as I might want to go out and Mmm, be a participant in some civil disobedience, I’m not doing it because one, that’s not my role right now. Number two, I don’t think it would be in my best interest for my health and my wife’s health and my daughter’s health. So I’m going to stay home. But what I am doing is reading everything that I could get my hands on about who’s trying to find a solution and rather than be a part of the problem and what can I offer in terms of expertise and support and help to do that. RV: (16:16) So can I, I have a question too. You should have scheduled your own interview, Anton. We need to have you. We’re going to do multiple. That’s right. All right. This is, AJV: (16:26) So what other questions I have, because I think this is just really pertinent and I think it’s a part of your expertise is there just seems to be a lack of leadership and all of this and a lack of a real coherent and consistent message of what do we want to see happen. And you know what’s like w where does that leave everybody? If there isn’t true leadership and there isn’t a true cause and a true message of like, let’s make this clear. AG: (16:54) Yes. AJV: (16:55) What needs to happen. So, RV: (16:56) Right. Like lighting a church on fire doesn’t signal a real clear message about what we want to see happen. In fact, it’s a very conflicting message to respond to violence with violence. At least that’s how it feels to me. AG: (17:09) Yes. So you’re exactly right. So I literally did a Facebook live about this last night for about an hour. And I hearkened back onto successful change efforts in America. I mean, you can go as far back from women’s sufferage to the civil rights movement. We’ve had a lot of successful change efforts in all of those efforts. You have to know what you want. Yeah. And not only know what you want, be able to clearly articulated in a way that everybody presents. You know, when you talk about building a brand, you gotta have clarity, right? You’re on problem and clear on the solution. AG: (17:51) Exactly. You have to be clear on a problem and clear on the solution. And the problem that we have in this current environment is there, there’s no clarity about this. There’s zero clarity from my vantage point around what do we want? I know what I want, but the solution to that is not clear because again, if you’ve got, you know, multiple things happening in multiple cities, the problem in Charleston, South Carolina is completely different than the problem in Nashville, which is completely different than the problem in Minnesota, which is completely different than the problem in New York city. And so because those problems looks similar on the surface, people are trying to apply a solution to fix all problems and there’s not one solution. This is a, a local by local problem and solution framework. And so when you, when you don’t have good leadership, the problem stays. AG: (18:49) I, I, I give people this kind of advice and I’ve given it to president Obama. So I just tell you anything I’m saying here is stuff that I say all the time to leaders at every level, from the dog catcher to the mayor, to even the president of United States. And the first is whenever you had a crisis, the first thing you must do is remain calm. The second thing you must do is you got to tell the truth. And when I say tell the truth, you have to be honest with people about where you sit and where things are cause people in a time of uncertainty, in a time of fear in a time of the unknown, people are looking for a beacon of hope. And so you got to tell them the truth and you got to tell them the truth, even when the truth is unpleasant. The thing with so many people forget. AG: (19:35) They want to tell you the rosy truth and they want to tell you the happy true. But they don’t want to tell you the unpleasant truth. So the unpleasant tree is difficult, but it’s grounding. And I, and I say this all the time, the truth doesn’t hurt. It heals. So if we can begin to say, AJ, you are a Rory, you have skin cancer. So I can lie to you and say, Oh, you just got a blemish on your face and telling you you have a blemish on your face is cool and nice and, and you, you don’t feel bad about it. But if you find out that that blemishes cancer, then you can begin to do something about it. Because some people may say, Oh, I got a blemish. I’m just going to accept the blemish and be okay with it. But if you know a skin cancer, then you have to respond. AG: (20:20) So we got to tell people the truth and we got to tell it to them in a heartfelt way. You don’t need to be angry with the truth. You don’t have to be screaming about the truth. You can empathize with people and be heartfelt about telling the truth. But then the third step after that to me is you got to seek out expertise who can help you to find a solution. Yeah, that’s the problem is that we, Einstein said this one time, that many spend 95% of their time trying to solve the problem but only spent 5% understanding the problem. Well, we need to spend 95% understanding the problem and 5% of the time on the solution and you got to have experts to help you to solve the problem. And that’s what leadership does, is that they remain calm. They tell the truth, they tell it in a heartfelt way, and then they find experts to help them to solve the problem. And that’s what we don’t have in this kind of environment. The people who I know have expertise on not being sought out, they’re being questioned, they’re being antagonized, they’re actually being accused of being complicit in the problem when they actually have real ideas around a solution. RV: (21:32) Well, that’s an you know, that’s something that I’ve struggled with with this personally. You know, you talk about leaders, just leadership in general. You respond, you don’t react. You know, I’m seeing a lot of message and I’ve had some people messaged me about like, Hey, why haven’t you shared? Or why don’t you share something? And as a leader, my, one of my first thing is I’ve been afraid to say this, one of my very first things is I need to find the facts in any situation. It’s like as a leader, not civil rights, just leadership training is going, I need to understand the facts. And there are, as you said, and I, I love that you pointed out, I believe that it’s different in every city too. And I believe that every instance of this is different. RV: (22:17) Any type of silence is not condoning something. It’s going, I don’t have the full context of what happened in Minneapolis or in Atlanta or like, and, and until, I know I’m afraid to come out and judge anybody in any, you know, cause I just, I just don’t know. But I think it’s, it almost becomes popular that people want you to just lash out and rage. They want you to just throw fire. They be because they want you to be mad. And it’s like I am mad. Like I’m, I’m heartbroken. And there are, there are parts of these things that you go, they’re undisputable, they’re worth being mad about just like looking at it. But then there’s, there’s context around every situation, every social interaction, every communication with a spouse, a child, a teacher, a colleague. And that context really matters. And it, and it shapes a lot. And I’ve been actually afraid to say that cause I’m afraid of people just being pissed off at me for not being pissed off right away. Like, like you know, publicly. AG: (23:19) Yeah. So, so I will tell you this, and this is one of the things that I, I’ve gotten very comfortable and as a leader is recognizing that somebody is always going to be pissed off at you. And if, if nobody’s pissed off at you, then you’re doing it wrong. That’s the main point. And I know as an influencer you want to grow your brand and you want everybody to like you and everybody to on your team. But you know what? The happiest thing that I get every day in my inbox is the number of people who unsubscribed from my list. You know what? I’m happy about that. Yeah. Because I know what I’m offering is not for you, you, you, you’re not invested in what I’m invested in and, and you don’t like it. And that’s okay because I want the people who do like it, the people who do get the value, the people who do want to build, adjust organization. AG: (24:14) An organization full of ethical, inspiring and empowering leaders who worked in the unfairness in the workplace. That’s who I want to talk to you. Okay? I don’t want to talk to the people who want to carry it on or the people who are indifferent to it. And I think the thing that a lot of people are probably most frustrated with but people that don’t speak out is the indifference. And so my context would be you want to have the facts, you definitely want to have the facts. But for many of us, particularly me, that what happened in Minnesota is not the straw that broke the camel’s back. My back was broken on March 3rd, 1991 when I saw Rodney King get beat 56 times by LA police officers and they all got off Scott free. So for me it was a a moment as a teenager that said that I thought this was over. AG: (25:09) I thought this happened, you know, during the civil rights movement. I thought this happened in the 18 hundreds where you know, you could get pulled over and never be seen again. But here I am in the midst of getting ready to go to college and this is what’s happening. So some people would say, we’ve known this all along. There’s no additional facts for you to gather in this situation. But I think the, the burning and the riots and in the burning down buildings and kicking in Apple stores and all these other kinds of things, this is what I also have learned doing this work. Everybody who is with you is not for you. Your body does for you is not going to be with you. And there are some agent provocateurs who are using this yeah. Crisis or this opportunity to advance an agenda that has absolutely nothing to do with justice in equity and fairness in the right thing. They have some of them. RV: (26:09) Yeah. And Anton, I just wanted to make sure that you said everyone who is with you is not for you and everyone who is for you is not with you. AG: (26:17) That is correct. Everyone who is with you is not for you. And everyone who is for you is now with you. So let me break it down. So you understand when I say everyone that is with you is not for you. There are people who are showing up and turning peaceful protest into violent protest, right? There are people who will show up at your events that are not really there to support your business there to copy and steal what you do. So everyone that is with you is not for you. The people who follow you on social media, they might be your followers, but they’re not for you. They’re for themselves. And we all have to understand that that’s always been the case. And secondarily, the people who are with you, sometimes they can’t be there for you. They’re with you in spirit. They may be with you in dollars, they may be with you in some other kind of way, but they’re not always going to be there side by side with you. AG: (27:16) So I’m with a lot of people that I can’t be side by side because I want to be here longterm. I want to be a person who lives a long time. And so for me, knowing that I work in healthcare, 90%, knowing that we’re still in the middle of a pandemic, I know it’s not cool to go back out and socialize right now. I get reports on how many new positive coded cases are showing up every day and we’re not in a clear, so I’m with a lot of people for a lot of people, but I’m not going to be there all the time. So you got to understand that you gotta be able to figure out who is with you and who is for you and what are they doing to help you and who are those that are not really for you. AG: (27:59) And again, I go back to some years of go work when I was being trained into the seat. So to be honest with you, I was trained at a place called Highlander in Tennessee. Tennessee’s where actually Dr. Martin Luther King jr and Rosa parks, all of them got their training on community organizing. Like some people thought Rosa parks sitting down on a bus and refusing to go to the back was a spur of the moment off the cuff event. It wasn’t not, they plan this for months in advance and they have five different people and Rosa parks actually was the one that was chosen to stay on the front of the bus. So most people think this is big civil rights broke protests started with a seminal event of someone just deciding not to get up anymore when she was a trained, a prepared leader who knew what to do and when to do it. AG: (28:54) So in my training, I learned then whenever we do things like this, there are people who are not really with us who are going to see what we’re doing and want to jump in. We got to control that because they could destroy the message, they could cloudy the message that we’re trying to send here. Then it can turn into something that is not. And that’s what I think we, we are seeing right now that there’s some people who are clouding the message that is not really about, you know, police violence. It’s about anarchy or it’s about I hate the government or it’s about, I hate rich people. It’s about I hate America. Because I do believe there’s some form foreign people who are involved in some of these efforts. And so we don’t know which is which at this point. We don’t know the enemy, our friend, because we haven’t taken a time to, to develop the right structure and strategy to move for change. AG: (29:51) And, and to give a quick plug to my former boss Barack Obama, his foundation has been trying to do his best job of this stealing information around what’s a right way for you to get involved. He posted the article on medium recently about, I know everybody’s upset. Protest is a part of, of making change. And we’ve always used protest in America from the Boston tea party onto present day. So he’s not saying not to protest, but he’s saying is getting involved in a way that can make sure that the positive change is lasting and that we actually do the right thing. And so he provided resources at the Obama foundation website. And so I would encourage people to figure out what you can do. But I think the main thing is we got to separate the wheat from the shaft and know that everybody that is with you is not for you and everybody that is for you. Sometimes it’s not with, AJV: (30:45) That’s so wise. That’s so good. One of the, one of the interviews that I saw online here recently was the son of an Atlanta, a city police officer. I’m a black man and he was, he did this really great speech, super emotional, but the thing that has stuck with me and I can’t get out of my head, he said, you don’t fight the enemy by burning down your own house. AG: (31:08) Correct. AJV: (31:08) And you said people were burning down our own house. Wait, that doesn’t work. AG: (31:14) It’s not smart. And that was killer Mike. He’s a hip hop artist, activist. I’m one degree separated and kill Mike because one of my mentees actually used to make beads for him. And I’m trying to get him to be a brand builder client too, by the way. So so yeah, I was willing to help, but that’s a point that, that everybody should understand that if you’re trying to solve a problem, go to where the problem is. Don’t go to where the problems now. So here’s how I explained it to him, the friends of mine and a conference call. If, if I have a nail in my foot five a nail in my foot, it doesn’t make sense for you to put a bandaid on my shoulder. Yeah, that doesn’t, that’s not solving the problem. Why don’t you haven’t taken the nail out of my foot and you haven’t stopped the bleeding on my foot. And so if the nail is in Minneapolis, well, if the nail is in Louisville, Kentucky, why are you burning down in Atlanta, Georgia, right? While you’re riding in Charleston, South Carolina. And again, my point is there are problems in every one of those cities. Atlanta is not perfect. Nashville’s not perfect Charleston, that there’s no perfect utopian city in the United States of America. But those problems require a specific and clear solution to those problems. AG: (32:37) If there’s a nail in your foot, it doesn’t mean there’s RV: (32:40) A nail in every foot. Like the problem isn’t even as a city necessarily. It is a person, a few people, a set of people. And if you can understand who it is, you can proactively handle the problem, which is the truth about any problem in business or our personal life or anything. You can’t. But if you’re blinded by just rage, it’s like you can’t see the problem. All you know is you’re in pain and so you start bandaging yourself and shooting other people and it’s like, Hey, there’s a nail in your foot. Get the nail out. AG: (33:14) Yes. And that’s exactly right. And in problems have levels to them. So, so I, I, you know, my training is social work. When I got my MSW was understanding systems in organizations where you have individual problems, you have group problems, you have family problems, you have organizational problems. And so like when I work with a healthcare organization, I want to understand the problem across the organization. You might have a problem in this department or you might have a problem with this person, right? But is it representative of a systemic problem of how you hire people and who you hire and how you train them and what you allow them to do and what don’t you allow them to do? And what I find more times than not is that people want to solve problems, but they feel paralyzed because they’re going to be punished by a largest system for trying to solve the problem. AG: (34:09) So it requires us to have some level of depth and understanding around what problems are, what our role is, and to solving those problems and going right to the source. As I told my group last night, I said, listen, Mmm. If, if you have police officers who are committing bad acts, okay. Then RDC that the person who can specifically do something about that problem is the police chief that hired them. And if the police chief doesn’t see the problem and doesn’t understand the problem where there’s a specific person who can do something about that person. And that’s the mayor of city manager that hired a police chief. Yeah. And if the mayor and the police chief doesn’t see that problem and doesn’t understand that problem, there’s a specific group of people who can do something about the mayor. And those are the voters who live in that city. AG: (35:07) But if you don’t live in that city, you don’t have the ability to get rid of the mayor. You don’t have the ability to affect the chief of police and you don’t have the ability to affect those officers. Now you can contribute in ways to influence their problems. So going back to the word influence, there are a few things that each of us can control. There are other things that we can influence if we can’t control and if we can’t control it or influence it, our responsibility is to lead. And we, we, we lead by being the example of what we want to see in the world. So if there’s injustice be just, if there’s unfairness, be more fair, if there’s inequity being more equitable. So it’s about what you can control, what you can influence it, where you can leave, but you got to understand the problem. AG: (35:56) And I think so many people haven’t taken the time in this situation to just understand the problem from a societal problem of law enforcement, police and communities, particularly communities of color, two. Our response to when those things happen because I think the main thing, and I’ll say this last point about what happened in, in any of these specific events, it’s not just that we see a bad cop do a bad thing because in every industry there is a bad person that does a bad thing. So you got a bad doctor who does a bad thing. You might have a bad hairdresser that does a bad thing, bad speakers, every industry you can’t fix bad things that individuals do. We can’t control in police individual behavior. The question is when that individual does a bad thing, is there any accountability for that individual? And I think what people are so outraged by is the continued bad things done by certain officers. AG: (37:06) And they rarely get in trouble. They rarely go to jail. The worst thing that happens to them is they lose their job. I mean, think about it. If you murdered somebody and the worst thing that happened to you is that you lost your job. Yep. That’s where is w where the outrage reviews until the conflict. How do we make sure that when bad things happen that we improve the process so they don’t ever have to happen again? Like if you take the airline industry, I’ll give you this, this example. Mmm. We rarely have plane crashes in the United States of America now 35 40 years ago we had a lot of plane crashes, but every time a plane crashes, the entire airline industry works like crazy to find out what happened, to make sure that it never happens again. Like we have four hijackers who crashed planes into buildings, into the Pentagon and nine 11 and there was nobody that was a Homeland security expert on September 10 2011 there was no Homeland security experts, not one. AG: (38:16) But after that day, the entire country, the entire government, every single person began to find a way to make sure this would never happen again. It doesn’t matter why it happened, how we let it happen, we want to investigate that and understand the facts of what led to it. But we’re going to do everything in our power and spend ungodly amounts of money and ungodly amounts of training and hiring new people and changing our processes so that it never happens again. And if we’re going to be good at solving problems when bad things happen or bad people happen, we got to figure out how do we prevent them from ever happening again. And when we don’t see that happening, that speaks to a larger challenge. RV: (39:03) I love that. That, and so, and I need to ask you this question specifically that that parallel is so good. Anton and I, I certainly, you know, even though I’m saying like, Hey, we got to find the facts and things are different in every city, I also very much empathize with when you see Rodney King all the way to where we are now and you see example after example, it’s like, Hey there, there certainly is evidence that there is, there are some systemic problems that need to be dealt with and people need to rally. But even to just know what you shared here of like go to the police chief, go to the mayor and also, you know what I’ve never seen as an article that recounts all of these instances. Yeah. What were the facts afterwards and then what happened to all the officers? RV: (39:50) Right. Like all in one place. You know, I’m thinking to myself like maybe that’s an article I should write is to go show people because once the facts have been revealed, justice should be served and it should be clear and Swift. But, but so anyways, that was so awesome. So much. This is so good. But hold on. I got it. Okay. So I have to ask you this question specifically as it relates to our audience and this, the theme of this podcast being personal branding. You, you’ve mentioned several times, examples of staying in your lane. You spent a part of your life as, as an activist and organizer and being on the streets. But now you’re saying you’re making an intentional choice to stay at home because of various, you know, considerations. Mmm. Do you feel like personal brands should be using their platform? RV: (40:42) Like if I teach yoga, should I be telling them, should I be taking my audience and telling them why racism is wrong? Should I be connecting? It should buy, should I be saying, Hey, that doesn’t, that’s not what my expertise is about. Like how do you balance? Yeah, because a platform is a sacred thing and audience is a sacred thing and the audience that you have didn’t necessarily show up for your opinion on everything that you’re not an expert on. But at the same time, we’re all people, we all have beliefs and as humans we are all in this together. And this, you know, Martin Luther King’s in an injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere, which I fully believe and support. Well, finding that balance between, so do you go, yeah. Tell people what you believe and even if it’s outside of your lane, but you’ve used that term stay in your lane. How do you, how do you find the line? AG: (41:33) Yeah, so, so I think the, the, the summary of how I would explain it and when, I mean stay in your lane is that Mmm, the best brands, the best personal brands are the people who are the most authentic that people connect to intimately. They just don’t know, Oh, what you want to teach them. They know who you are. Like I know who you two are. Okay, I don’t, you might teach me everything I want to know about being a personal brand, but I know who you are. I know how you met and how your relationship started and what you did before you were building a personal brand and your, your, your life story so to speak. So you can’t divorce yourself from who you are if you’re really building a strong personal brand. So my point is staying in your lane, if it’s something that is connected to who you are and what you do, then they find a way to connect it to what’s relevant. AG: (42:26) Because I think one of the things that you teach in personal branding is how do you, how do you take what you do as a personal brand and connected to what’s going on in the world and what people need. And so if you teach yoga, you don’t necessarily have to say racism is bad and that, you know, you know, police brutality is bad. You can say, I know everybody is stressed out right now and the world is stressed and we’re seeing bad things happen all around us. But yoga is a solution to get personal alignment in yourself so you can help get personal alignment in the work. So again, you’ve given some money to say, you know what, I never done yoga in my life, but if something can help me to get this tightness out of my neck because I’m angry at what happened in Minnesota or I’m angry about what happened last month and what happened last year, maybe this is a way that I should try that I haven’t tried before. So if I’m a yoga teacher, that might work, but not, maybe I don’t do anything related to yoga or I don’t run a fitness gym or maybe I teach karate or RV: (43:36) So, but to stick with the, to stick with the yoga thing, if I’m going to follow a yoga instructor. Do you think it’s important that the yoga instructor I’m following is sharing their personal viewpoints on abortion, women’s rights, politics, racism AJV: (43:52) For both of you here, like this is actually something we teach. We say once you know what your problem is, you answered all of the things, all of the questions that are happening in the world through the lens of the problem that you solved. AG: (44:04) Yes. AJV: (44:05) What is your unique lens on whatever the problem is that you saw? Like for me, my personal brain problem is irrelevant, right? I don’t speak on racism or discrimination. I don’t speak on gender equality. I don’t speak on those. But that doesn’t mean that my problem of irrelevance, it can’t be seen through the lens of all these things happening. Not to go out and say, here’s my opinions for the world to hear. But that doesn’t mean it’s not connected to who I am as a human being. Because the problem that I solve is connected to all of these things. It’s just how do you take what’s happening through the lens in which you see things as a personal brand. AG: (44:45) Yeah. So, so you agent you hit is something, and definitely Roy, I’m going to connect to that point. If you’re, if the problem you solve is irrelevance. There’s a lot of people who are feeling very irrelevant right now. Okay? Mmm. Women in the workplace feel irrelevant every day. So, so there, and that’s a problem. And so you can find a way to connect to it. But to Roy’s point about my views on abortion are my views on, you know, X, Y, and Z. My opinion is you don’t have to go there to go there. So like if, if I’m living my truth, if I’m being completely authentic, then it only takes one word or two words in Google, Google, gun and Obama. So you’d Google my name of Barack Obama’s name, then you know my position on healthcare issues, you know my position, well healthcare reform, you might know my position on how do we rebuild the economy, but you don’t know where I stand on abortion. AG: (45:47) You don’t know where I stand on gay marriage, you know where I stand on any of these issues. And those things are personal to me, but they haven’t been the full scope and scale of what I’ve done in my life. But again, if it’s connected to what you’ve done. So if you’re a yoga instructor who had an abortion and it caused you to go down this spiral dark hole in your life and the only thing that pulled you out was that you learned how to do yoga, then maybe it’s okay to connect the dots in that way. But that doesn’t mean you showing up at every abortion rally and trying to give keynote speeches around abortion in America because that’s not your lane. Your lane is yoga. Okay? But your personal story gives you a way to connect to what’s real. So I tell people to be authentic. AG: (46:39) And then the last piece of every influencer that if you got 50,000 Instagram followers or 150,000 or 5 million Instagram followers, I’m pretty sure your local elected official knows who you are. And if they don’t, they should know who you are. So if nothing else, you use your influence to say, Hey listen, I would like to meet with the mayor to understand what’s going on in our community and how it’s similar or different than what’s going on in another community. And so if you can get an education, just say, you know what, we haven’t had a case of police brutality in this city since the mid 1980s well that’s a good thing to say. You know what, this is happening in America and is wrong. But I’m very proud of my city because it’s not happening here. But you should never make that statement unless you know, never, ever, ever talk about what you don’t know because it will make people ask you questions that you can’t answer beyond the surface level. AG: (47:47) So to your point, Rory, doing some research around, you know, the last 25 years or 30 years of police encounters that ended in a death of a person of color and understanding how many it is because it’s, it’s much more than we got on video. I will tell you that much cause I’ve done that level of research. So, but no the answer and then say, Hey, this statistically is a problem and we should be doing something about it and I can’t fix the whole world. I can solve every other problem, but I can talk to the mayor of Nashville. Well I can talk to my city council member or my state legislator and understand what are we doing to prevent this from happening here? And if they give you an answer, be happy and be proud about that. That’s the main point. AJV: (48:36) Yeah. I so agree. And what are the, there was two things that happened over the weekend that prompted me to bring up this interview with Rory cause I really, I really like, I prayed about it hard because we had both been kind of like, okay, yep. What’s our role? Like what’s our role in this? And there was two things that happened over the weekend that I just felt like I thought literally was like, and this is the path for you [inaudible] stuff. The first thing was Whitney Hawthorne, who’s one of our brand builders clients, right? She’s awesome. She’s amazing. And she recently had her son, her second son. And you know, we have two boys and there really close in age. Like our boys are only a few months apart. Both of them. Yeah. [inaudible] She posted something really simple on social media about this newborn baby and however she drafted it, it made me think I will never [inaudible] [inaudible] the fear because she has, AG: (49:36) Do you want I just lost it. Yeah. I saw that post too. And know I think God every day that I had a daughter and a son, and it’s hard to, to, to fathom that to say, you know, you know, God gives you to get the children you want, whatever God gives you. Right. But when I had a daughter, there was an extra sense of relief in me that I didn’t have a son because I know what me and my brothers have gone through with our encounters with law enforcement. And I know that even as a 40 something year old man who’s lives in a suburban nice neighborhood, you know, professional got multiple degrees, I got a great career. Everything is going the way that I wanted to go. The moment I get in my car and just drive to the grocery store, if a cop pulls behind me, my entire physiology changes. AG: (50:44) I break out on a full sweat. I wonder, do I have my driver’s license? I wonder where’s my driver’s license? I don’t put it in my glove compartment. I literally keep it on the visor above my head because I don’t want to reach down or reach into the console and make it think that I’m doing something. I’ll throw my phone on the passenger seat because I don’t want him to think that I have anything in my hands. And so I don’t want to teach my daughter those kinds of things. Yeah. But unfortunately, there’ve been enough cases with women that I’m also having to teach my daughter because it’s happened to black girls too. It happened to Sandra bland. And so, so I don’t want any of this. And I know that there are a lot of people who will never understand this. And, and I, and I’ve been selling into a lot of my friends who I’m not black and no share my experience. AG: (51:36) I’ve been getting text messages from them and they literally have been, Mmm. I don’t know what to say. I want to help. I just want you to know I’m thinking about you and my response to them is that I appreciate you think it about me. I appreciate you caring about me and I appreciate you empathizing with my situation and [inaudible] and that’s all that I can ask you to do. And then if they ask me further, what is there anything I can do to help? I said that the one thing that I believe that you can do to help is you can talk about this because, and talk about this in a way that is, talk about this in places that I can’t go to talk about it. Okay. Mmm. You know, my pastor, I go to an a interracial church and my pastor is white and he is the founder of the church, is a massive church with more than 25,000 members. AG: (52:30) And when he was retiring and handing over the ministry to his son, he says, I’m going to spend the rest of my life in ministry, tearing down the walls of race in America, and particularly in church because Sunday is the most segregated day in America. And so I’m going to use my platform. I’m going to use my influence. I’m going to use my brand power to make sure that we tat on a Rosa wall’s race. And that didn’t mean doing anything visceral and violent. You know what that meant? That meant every time we invited a guest speaker to church, it was a speaker of color. And, and let them come in and preach to the congregation. It means standing up a diversity group and asking Anton to chair to diversity group, it meant going down to the city and asking the mayor, what are you doing to bring people together of color? AG: (53:23) And the mayor is going to respond to him because he’s the of a church with 25,000 people. So again, he didn’t step outside of his lane. He just started asking questions and talking about this in places that I couldn’t talk about it to people who wouldn’t give me the audience to talk about. So it doesn’t have to be big. It could just really be a conversation. No, to be clear, there’s some of us that got to give beyond the conversation because you can talk to somebody and they can continue to do the same behaviors over and over again. And then that means you got to move to the next level of how we change. And, and I think that is warranted where we are right now. But again, there’s so many people who are not talking about it. As I, as I teach the people who live in oblivion. AG: (54:06) Mmm. You know, I, I teach that in the social conscious construct, you got about half of people who are living in oblivion that they didn’t see anything that you saw that pricked your heart and mind and want to have this conversation. They never got a text or a message from their friends saying, why you aren’t saying anything. They just kind of, you know, a happy go lucky move in. And leave it to Beaver land or whatever, and they don’t see anything that’s 50% okay. Yeah. The 35% of them who sees something’s wrong, but they either don’t know what to say or they thank you, somebody else to this problem to solve or they say, little low me can’t do anything about it. And that’s understandable for time, but because you know better, you should know that there’s always something that you can do. The small baby steps lead to the bigger steps, but then there’s a smaller group of people about 10% who literally believe that they benefit emotionally, morally economically, politically from being, staying the way they are. AG: (55:17) Yeah. And we have to find a way to deal with those people, but those people are in the minority. Right. I listened to your podcast religiously, and so when you did the interview with Andy Andrews, and he talked a little bit about his book, how do you kill 11 million people? He pointed out in the book that at the height of the Nazi party, they were only eight and a half million of them when there were 80 million people in Germany. So you had this 10% minority that had control of an 80 million minority. So we got to stop the 10% wherever they are in business, in the world and wherever. But it’s so many more of us on the other side who can do the right thing, it should do the right thing. And that’s what I’m trying to teach is how to become a 5% leader. AG: (56:13) The admired leader who stands up for justice and there’s a laundry list of people, Dr. King Nelson Mandela, Margaret Thatcher, mother. These are people who says, you know what? I’m going to figure out what this problem is and I’m going to use my pulpit, my brand, my platform to figure out what I can do and what mother Teresa could do is not what Dr. King could do. So we’re all different. Well we got to stay in our lane and figure out what we can do to make a difference. And that’s what building the best brand is all about. RV: (56:46) Well you are a 5% leader and this has probably been one of the most enlightening conversations that I’ve had. Amen. And a really, really long that, and it’s just so helpful. I mean, just as a, as a friend Anton, to just hear your voice and hear your perspective on it. And I think it’s such a, a balance of what’s right and not who’s right and just doing what you can and not overstepping your bounds but standing for what is right. I’m just really, really graceful. We love you. We believe in you. Where should people go if they want to connect with you? I mean your, your brand is about leadership and like you, your, your voice man, like this is, this is why you’ve been through everything you’ve been through is like this time in the world right now I think lends itself to somebody just like you at just this moment. AG: (57:42) Well I really appreciate it and I agree. And if people want to connect with me, you can go to Anton Gunn. Com. That’s the home for all things. Anton, I’m on all social media platforms. I love Instagram, but LinkedIn is where I do the most dialogue around helping leaders be better leaders. So please follow and connect with me on LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter. But this is a time for all of us to learn how to grow as a leader and to have a greater impact and be the person who is the difference maker that makes the biggest difference. That’s what we all can do. RV: (58:17) Thank you, Anton. Thanks, buddy. Thank you.

Ep 74: Responding Versus Reacting to Injustice with Anton Gunn

RV: (00:00) Hey there. Brand builder. Excited to bring you really a special edition here of the influential personal brand podcasts, a very unplanned, spontaneous we want to introduce you to a good friend of ours. I’m a client of ours, somebody who believes in us, somebody who we believe in tremendously. Somebody who we look up to. His name is Anton Gunn and he is a former senior advisor to president Barack Obama. And Anton is one of the world’s leading authorities on socially conscious leadership. So he has a master’s degree in social work from USC and was a resident fellow at Harvard. He is the bestselling author of the presidential principles and he’s been featured in time magazine, the wall street journal, BBC, NPR, and on good morning America. And as an international speaker and consultant, he’s worked with organizations like Microsoft, Sedexo, KPMG, Verizon, Aetna, Vanderbilt health and Boeing on and on and on. RV: (00:58) And so from playing sec football and being the first African American in history elected to the South Carolina legislature from his from his district early in his career to now working as a C level executive for an academic health system and serving on multiple boards. He has spent his life building or help helping people build diverse high performing teams and world-class leadership culture. And was this on our heart for you to hear from him about some of the things going on in the world and specifically how to use your personal brand to influence real change? And I’m going to let AJ say something cause she, I can, I can tell she’s bubbling. And you know, if you’ve listened to the show, you know that AJ does not often conduct the interviews. She does all the debriefs, AJV: (01:53) But since then RV: (01:54) This was, this one was right from AJs heart. So AJV: (01:57) Well they’ll say yes, Amazon has this really nice, fancy bio with all of this amazing accomplishments. But the real reason that I felt led to forced Anton to get on this call of us, which he was so happy to oblige so quickly, it’s honestly, he’s so representative of what we believe in as people and as a part of our, our community at brand builders group, we just believe like Anton comes from a place of real experience. So do you also comes from a place that he really believes in justice but also doing it in a way that actually creates change by using real influence because he’s doing things the right way. And that’s not easy. That’s actually really hard and it takes a lot of discipline to do things the the long way and that, but I just feel like you’re such a extension of what we believe in. And so thanks for, thanks for popping. AG: (02:53) Thank you for saying that. AIJ and I love you both. You are awesome. So happy to be a client. Happy to be your friend and happy to help you and all of your listeners and supporters understand that this is an important time for all of us to use our influence in authentic ways, in ways that we feel comfortable with, most importantly to help bend the arc of the moral universe more towards justice. And it already bends that way, but it requires each of us to do something in a way that helps to make things better. That’s what our responsibility to our leaders is to work, to make things right and every chance that we get. So I appreciate you creating the space for that and doing that and living up to who you are as individuals and as a business. RV: (03:39) Well, I love that Anton, and honestly we’ve struggled with what to say. I mean there’s a lot of things that I could say and kind of want to say, but don’t necessarily feel like they’re appropriate or you know, right on pace. I think that’s a lot of a lot of people. And, and, and like you said, as. AJV: (03:58) I feel like it’s so sensitive right now and being twisted and turned, and even with the best of intentions, it comes across as you’re ignorant. You don’t know anything. You don’t understand. Yeah, no, but that doesn’t mean we’re not trying. RV: (04:14) And, and I, I think, you know, when we reached out to you, we said, Hey, we don’t want to make this like a news media commentary on anything specific that’s happening in the news. But okay. You know, you’ve got a moral compass for fairness and justice. RV: (04:27) And I think one of the things that I struggle with, and I just wanted to ask you as your friend is, you know, there’s been a lot of stuff that says, Hey, you know, being silent as part of the problem, you know, silence, you know, basically if you’re silent, you’re racist. I don’t necessarily, that doesn’t necessarily connect with me. I don’t necessarily think that being silent means you’re racist any more than I think making a post will change the world. But what I am very interested in is what are the things productively that we can do? And that we should do like not just, not just using our voice, but what are the things that we can do. And you have such an interesting perspective from working in the white house to being, you know, a division one athlete to leading it in the healthcare world there. Yeah. AJV: (05:23) They’re all of these things, right? AG: (05:26) Yeah. So let me just say AG: (05:30) Know you gotta you gotta remember a leader’s responsibility is to respond and not react. And what do I mean by respond and not react? You know, whenever you’re in the heat of any kind of difficult circumstance, any kind of crisis, your emotions will get the best of you immediately. And what you see some people doing on social media are there emotional responses to what’s going on? And it’s not understandable for people to have an emotional response. Some people’s emotional response is to or emotional reaction is to lash out and scream at you for not saying anything. Cause if you’re not saying anything, then that means you must agree with the bad people who are doing bad things. Right. That’s a, that’s really a reaction. That’s not really a thoughtful prepared response. That’s a reaction. Some people’s reaction is because they’re so shocked by what they see. AG: (06:28) They freeze and they don’t want to say anything. I mean, we’ve all seen in circumstances you’re going to do three things. If you’re confronted in a crisis, you’re going to freeze, you’re going to fight, where are you going to flight any other direction? And I think what we have in the middle of any kind of crisis is that people freeze. Some people fight and others flight, and so I think the people who are fighting are the ones who are screaming out on social media. Some people are so distraught about what they see that they freeze and so that is sometimes silent. You’re when you freeze your assignment and some people could immediately assume because you’re not fighting like me. Oh, because you’re not running like me. Then that means you must agree with those who are doing bad things. That is not the case, but what you should do is be thoughtful about how you can have a positive point in the specs. AG: (07:23) How can you add to the construction of a solution and not to further destruction of the problem? And so what I tell people to do is first of all remain yeah. In your lane. And when I say remaining your lane is, you know, for the first 12 years of my career I actually was a community organizer. So I’ve organized protests, I’ve organized marches, I’ve done sit ins, I’ve actually hold politicians accountable for not doing the right thing. And that’s actually why I got into politics, because I got tired of politicians telling me one thing, but then doing the complete opposite. And I say, well, why am I asking you to do something that you clearly don’t have the capacity to do? Why don’t I just run for office and take your place? And literally that was my goal. But that’s not everybody. It’s not everybody’s name. AG: (08:15) Some people’s learning to say, Anton, you’re better to be out there on the front lines, but here’s what I can do. I have a hundred dollars and I’ll put it in a bail fund. So if you get arrested and go to jail, you can get out and go home to be with your family. Or maybe I’ll support your education campaign to teach people about what good policing policies are or what good environmental policy. So it doesn’t matter if it’s this current crisis or there’s other, some kind of injustice that exists. I will tell you this, we’ve had injustice in wrongdoing as long as we’ve had challenges in this country and around the world. I’ll give you an example of that is unfair and, but it’s something that everybody can relate to. The two of you decided to go out to dinner and you go to your favorite restaurant in Nashville and you’ve been waiting 90 minutes for a table and then my wife and I walk in five minutes in a manner of these sets us down at the best table in the house. AG: (09:16) But you’ve been waiting for 90 minutes now already. You know that that was wrong, that that was not right for me to be able to walk right in and sit down at a table where you’ve been waiting for 90 minutes. It doesn’t make you feel good. It doesn’t make you like the restaurant anymore because you felt that you were treated unfair. So the question is, what am I going to do if I learned that you’ve been waiting for 90 minutes, do I just keep my table and keep eating and say, you know what? Too bad, Roy and AGA, you had the weight, 90 minutes. What do I say to the maitre D? That’s wrong. I’m going to get up and I’m going to give them this table because they’ve been waiting for 90 minutes. And if you saw me sit down at a table, do you decide to storm out of the restaurant or do you just stand there and do nothing? AG: (10:05) You just accept that you know you lost the table. Or do you walk over to the maitre D and says, you know what? I don’t think it’s right. I don’t think it’s fair that we’ve been waiting for 90 minutes and we didn’t get the table that we asked for and you let somebody else have the table. Now the maitre D also has a choice and an option at that point. He can say, well, you’re just going to have to wait a little longer. Well, he can say, you know what, Roy J I’m sorry. As soon as our next table come available, I’m going to put you at the top of the list in all appetizers and a bottle of wine is on me. So in that situation, we all have the opportunity to respond or we could react, but the key is whatever it is, you want to be authentic to yourself. AG: (10:50) Where do you feel comfortable? And also when you have some expertise, because what I try to remind people is that we all have personal experiences in our lives that we can connect the dots to something else that’s going on. So you may not know what it’s like to be a black man living in America. I can count seven particular instances that I could have ended up like George Ford or Tamir rice or Eric Garner. All of them happened before the age of 27 Hmm. I did nothing wrong. I was a college athlete. I went to a gas station with my uncle to go in to just, he went to go get a bottle of Boone’s farm. Just tell you how long ago it was and I went in to play the lottery. You just connected with AGA. You might have more in common with Aja than you think. AG: (11:39) As it turns out, as it turns out you love boons Romney J yes, we all did. So we were leaving the gas station and out of nowhere, five police cars pulls up. They draw guns on us, they drag us out of the car, they throw us on the ground, he puts his knee in my back in accuses us of being a part of a game and doing a drive by shooting. We didn’t even live on that side of town, but my uncle worked at a restaurant over there and I caught the bus to his job. We got in his car and we’re driving home. We stopped by the gas station and this happened to me. So this is real for me, but it may not be real for you. You may never have experienced anything like that. But I would say you might know someone who has. AG: (12:28) And so in this time, I would say the first thing people can do if you’re trying to figure out how to use your influence, if you have people in your spear network, your friends with those people who you have in your cell phone, who you know might be feeling some kind of way about what’s going on, it’s okay to send them a text. We’ll make a phone call and say, Hey, listen, I don’t fully understand all of this going on. I don’t fully know what to do about any of this. But no, I’m thinking about you. And if you have people who follow you on social media, who you know fit that demographic, you can easily say, listen, Hey, I know you guys watch my pocket. You listen to my podcasts, you follow my feed. You’re on my list. I just want you to know for the interview who are affected by the current circumstances. I want you to know that I’m thinking about you. And I’m not sure what to do yet, but I’m trying to find out. [inaudible] AG: (13:19) We’re all going to be better because of this. And that’s the approach that you have to take is to say something, but you don’t have to have all of the answers because you don’t, you’re not an expert in that. This is about how to build a brand for a movement. Then they should definitely be talking to you, particularly if there’s a person leading the movement. But if this is just unrest or this is just community up uptick and outrage about things, you don’t necessarily have the lead dog role in this, but you can play a role. But first empathizing with people who might be experiencing it. And that’s what we all want. We all want someone to understand our pain, to understand what we’re going through. And you guys have done that just by creating the space and the opportunity. Second thing I was telling people, you are good at something. AG: (14:06) So some of us are great writers, some of us are great speakers, some of us are great at teaching people how to manage and deal with stress. So there are ways you can say, Hey, in the middle of the most stressful time that we might’ve seen in our lifetimes, here are three things. Things that you can do to lower your stress. That message becomes universal. No matter what your race, gender background is, that’s a universal way that you can help him make it. You provide people a way to say, listen, I want to create an outlet for people to be able to express themselves and let me provide feedback on how I can help you to channel that into something positive. Those are simple things or you can really start to do a little bit of research and say, who is working to make sure that injustice and unfairness no longer exists and how can I offer some free advice or some free counsel or free coaching session to help them through it. AG: (15:02) Now, that doesn’t have to be public at all. That can be very private, but it’s something that you can do too to add value and to be comfortable in your space. But speak to the times that we’re in because I do think Roy, there is a fear about the silence if, if it’s, if the silence goes on too long and people will assume silence is complicity. And so I don’t expect anybody in a emotional moment to react in aggressiveness or to jump right out and be a part of anything. Cause that’s what I’m not doing. I haven’t left my house. I still remember that we’re in the middle of a pandemic. And so I’m concerned about my health and my family’s health. So as bad as I might want to go out and Mmm, be a participant in some civil disobedience, I’m not doing it because one, that’s not my role right now. Number two, I don’t think it would be in my best interest for my health and my wife’s health and my daughter’s health. So I’m going to stay home. But what I am doing is reading everything that I could get my hands on about who’s trying to find a solution and rather than be a part of the problem and what can I offer in terms of expertise and support and help to do that. RV: (16:16) So can I, I have a question too. You should have scheduled your own interview, Anton. We need to have you. We’re going to do multiple. That’s right. All right. This is, AJV: (16:26) So what other questions I have, because I think this is just really pertinent and I think it’s a part of your expertise is there just seems to be a lack of leadership and all of this and a lack of a real coherent and consistent message of what do we want to see happen. And you know what’s like w where does that leave everybody? If there isn’t true leadership and there isn’t a true cause and a true message of like, let’s make this clear. AG: (16:54) Yes. AJV: (16:55) What needs to happen. So, RV: (16:56) Right. Like lighting a church on fire doesn’t signal a real clear message about what we want to see happen. In fact, it’s a very conflicting message to respond to violence with violence. At least that’s how it feels to me. AG: (17:09) Yes. So you’re exactly right. So I literally did a Facebook live about this last night for about an hour. And I hearkened back onto successful change efforts in America. I mean, you can go as far back from women’s sufferage to the civil rights movement. We’ve had a lot of successful change efforts in all of those efforts. You have to know what you want. Yeah. And not only know what you want, be able to clearly articulated in a way that everybody presents. You know, when you talk about building a brand, you gotta have clarity, right? You’re on problem and clear on the solution. AG: (17:51) Exactly. You have to be clear on a problem and clear on the solution. And the problem that we have in this current environment is there, there’s no clarity about this. There’s zero clarity from my vantage point around what do we want? I know what I want, but the solution to that is not clear because again, if you’ve got, you know, multiple things happening in multiple cities, the problem in Charleston, South Carolina is completely different than the problem in Nashville, which is completely different than the problem in Minnesota, which is completely different than the problem in New York city. And so because those problems looks similar on the surface, people are trying to apply a solution to fix all problems and there’s not one solution. This is a, a local by local problem and solution framework. And so when you, when you don’t have good leadership, the problem stays. AG: (18:49) I, I, I give people this kind of advice and I’ve given it to president Obama. So I just tell you anything I’m saying here is stuff that I say all the time to leaders at every level, from the dog catcher to the mayor, to even the president of United States. And the first is whenever you had a crisis, the first thing you must do is remain calm. The second thing you must do is you got to tell the truth. And when I say tell the truth, you have to be honest with people about where you sit and where things are cause people in a time of uncertainty, in a time of fear in a time of the unknown, people are looking for a beacon of hope. And so you got to tell them the truth and you got to tell them the truth, even when the truth is unpleasant. The thing with so many people forget. AG: (19:35) They want to tell you the rosy truth and they want to tell you the happy true. But they don’t want to tell you the unpleasant truth. So the unpleasant tree is difficult, but it’s grounding. And I, and I say this all the time, the truth doesn’t hurt. It heals. So if we can begin to say, AJ, you are a Rory, you have skin cancer. So I can lie to you and say, Oh, you just got a blemish on your face and telling you you have a blemish on your face is cool and nice and, and you, you don’t feel bad about it. But if you find out that that blemishes cancer, then you can begin to do something about it. Because some people may say, Oh, I got a blemish. I’m just going to accept the blemish and be okay with it. But if you know a skin cancer, then you have to respond. AG: (20:20) So we got to tell people the truth and we got to tell it to them in a heartfelt way. You don’t need to be angry with the truth. You don’t have to be screaming about the truth. You can empathize with people and be heartfelt about telling the truth. But then the third step after that to me is you got to seek out expertise who can help you to find a solution. Yeah, that’s the problem is that we, Einstein said this one time, that many spend 95% of their time trying to solve the problem but only spent 5% understanding the problem. Well, we need to spend 95% understanding the problem and 5% of the time on the solution and you got to have experts to help you to solve the problem. And that’s what leadership does, is that they remain calm. They tell the truth, they tell it in a heartfelt way, and then they find experts to help them to solve the problem. And that’s what we don’t have in this kind of environment. The people who I know have expertise on not being sought out, they’re being questioned, they’re being antagonized, they’re actually being accused of being complicit in the problem when they actually have real ideas around a solution. RV: (21:32) Well, that’s an you know, that’s something that I’ve struggled with with this personally. You know, you talk about leaders, just leadership in general. You respond, you don’t react. You know, I’m seeing a lot of message and I’ve had some people messaged me about like, Hey, why haven’t you shared? Or why don’t you share something? And as a leader, my, one of my first thing is I’ve been afraid to say this, one of my very first things is I need to find the facts in any situation. It’s like as a leader, not civil rights, just leadership training is going, I need to understand the facts. And there are, as you said, and I, I love that you pointed out, I believe that it’s different in every city too. And I believe that every instance of this is different. RV: (22:17) Any type of silence is not condoning something. It’s going, I don’t have the full context of what happened in Minneapolis or in Atlanta or like, and, and until, I know I’m afraid to come out and judge anybody in any, you know, cause I just, I just don’t know. But I think it’s, it almost becomes popular that people want you to just lash out and rage. They want you to just throw fire. They be because they want you to be mad. And it’s like I am mad. Like I’m, I’m heartbroken. And there are, there are parts of these things that you go, they’re undisputable, they’re worth being mad about just like looking at it. But then there’s, there’s context around every situation, every social interaction, every communication with a spouse, a child, a teacher, a colleague. And that context really matters. And it, and it shapes a lot. And I’ve been actually afraid to say that cause I’m afraid of people just being pissed off at me for not being pissed off right away. Like, like you know, publicly. AG: (23:19) Yeah. So, so I will tell you this, and this is one of the things that I, I’ve gotten very comfortable and as a leader is recognizing that somebody is always going to be pissed off at you. And if, if nobody’s pissed off at you, then you’re doing it wrong. That’s the main point. And I know as an influencer you want to grow your brand and you want everybody to like you and everybody to on your team. But you know what? The happiest thing that I get every day in my inbox is the number of people who unsubscribed from my list. You know what? I’m happy about that. Yeah. Because I know what I’m offering is not for you, you, you, you’re not invested in what I’m invested in and, and you don’t like it. And that’s okay because I want the people who do like it, the people who do get the value, the people who do want to build, adjust organization. AG: (24:14) An organization full of ethical, inspiring and empowering leaders who worked in the unfairness in the workplace. That’s who I want to talk to you. Okay? I don’t want to talk to the people who want to carry it on or the people who are indifferent to it. And I think the thing that a lot of people are probably most frustrated with but people that don’t speak out is the indifference. And so my context would be you want to have the facts, you definitely want to have the facts. But for many of us, particularly me, that what happened in Minnesota is not the straw that broke the camel’s back. My back was broken on March 3rd, 1991 when I saw Rodney King get beat 56 times by LA police officers and they all got off Scott free. So for me it was a a moment as a teenager that said that I thought this was over. AG: (25:09) I thought this happened, you know, during the civil rights movement. I thought this happened in the 18 hundreds where you know, you could get pulled over and never be seen again. But here I am in the midst of getting ready to go to college and this is what’s happening. So some people would say, we’ve known this all along. There’s no additional facts for you to gather in this situation. But I think the, the burning and the riots and in the burning down buildings and kicking in Apple stores and all these other kinds of things, this is what I also have learned doing this work. Everybody who is with you is not for you. Your body does for you is not going to be with you. And there are some agent provocateurs who are using this yeah. Crisis or this opportunity to advance an agenda that has absolutely nothing to do with justice in equity and fairness in the right thing. They have some of them. RV: (26:09) Yeah. And Anton, I just wanted to make sure that you said everyone who is with you is not for you and everyone who is for you is not with you. AG: (26:17) That is correct. Everyone who is with you is not for you. And everyone who is for you is now with you. So let me break it down. So you understand when I say everyone that is with you is not for you. There are people who are showing up and turning peaceful protest into violent protest, right? There are people who will show up at your events that are not really there to support your business there to copy and steal what you do. So everyone that is with you is not for you. The people who follow you on social media, they might be your followers, but they’re not for you. They’re for themselves. And we all have to understand that that’s always been the case. And secondarily, the people who are with you, sometimes they can’t be there for you. They’re with you in spirit. They may be with you in dollars, they may be with you in some other kind of way, but they’re not always going to be there side by side with you. AG: (27:16) So I’m with a lot of people that I can’t be side by side because I want to be here longterm. I want to be a person who lives a long time. And so for me, knowing that I work in healthcare, 90%, knowing that we’re still in the middle of a pandemic, I know it’s not cool to go back out and socialize right now. I get reports on how many new positive coded cases are showing up every day and we’re not in a clear, so I’m with a lot of people for a lot of people, but I’m not going to be there all the time. So you got to understand that you gotta be able to figure out who is with you and who is for you and what are they doing to help you and who are those that are not really for you. AG: (27:59) And again, I go back to some years of go work when I was being trained into the seat. So to be honest with you, I was trained at a place called Highlander in Tennessee. Tennessee’s where actually Dr. Martin Luther King jr and Rosa parks, all of them got their training on community organizing. Like some people thought Rosa parks sitting down on a bus and refusing to go to the back was a spur of the moment off the cuff event. It wasn’t not, they plan this for months in advance and they have five different people and Rosa parks actually was the one that was chosen to stay on the front of the bus. So most people think this is big civil rights broke protests started with a seminal event of someone just deciding not to get up anymore when she was a trained, a prepared leader who knew what to do and when to do it. AG: (28:54) So in my training, I learned then whenever we do things like this, there are people who are not really with us who are going to see what we’re doing and want to jump in. We got to control that because they could destroy the message, they could cloudy the message that we’re trying to send here. Then it can turn into something that is not. And that’s what I think we, we are seeing right now that there’s some people who are clouding the message that is not really about, you know, police violence. It’s about anarchy or it’s about I hate the government or it’s about, I hate rich people. It’s about I hate America. Because I do believe there’s some form foreign people who are involved in some of these efforts. And so we don’t know which is which at this point. We don’t know the enemy, our friend, because we haven’t taken a time to, to develop the right structure and strategy to move for change. AG: (29:51) And, and to give a quick plug to my former boss Barack Obama, his foundation has been trying to do his best job of this stealing information around what’s a right way for you to get involved. He posted the article on medium recently about, I know everybody’s upset. Protest is a part of, of making change. And we’ve always used protest in America from the Boston tea party onto present day. So he’s not saying not to protest, but he’s saying is getting involved in a way that can make sure that the positive change is lasting and that we actually do the right thing. And so he provided resources at the Obama foundation website. And so I would encourage people to figure out what you can do. But I think the main thing is we got to separate the wheat from the shaft and know that everybody that is with you is not for you and everybody that is for you. Sometimes it’s not with, AJV: (30:45) That’s so wise. That’s so good. One of the, one of the interviews that I saw online here recently was the son of an Atlanta, a city police officer. I’m a black man and he was, he did this really great speech, super emotional, but the thing that has stuck with me and I can’t get out of my head, he said, you don’t fight the enemy by burning down your own house. AG: (31:08) Correct. AJV: (31:08) And you said people were burning down our own house. Wait, that doesn’t work. AG: (31:14) It’s not smart. And that was killer Mike. He’s a hip hop artist, activist. I’m one degree separated and kill Mike because one of my mentees actually used to make beads for him. And I’m trying to get him to be a brand builder client too, by the way. So so yeah, I was willing to help, but that’s a point that, that everybody should understand that if you’re trying to solve a problem, go to where the problem is. Don’t go to where the problems now. So here’s how I explained it to him, the friends of mine and a conference call. If, if I have a nail in my foot five a nail in my foot, it doesn’t make sense for you to put a bandaid on my shoulder. Yeah, that doesn’t, that’s not solving the problem. Why don’t you haven’t taken the nail out of my foot and you haven’t stopped the bleeding on my foot. And so if the nail is in Minneapolis, well, if the nail is in Louisville, Kentucky, why are you burning down in Atlanta, Georgia, right? While you’re riding in Charleston, South Carolina. And again, my point is there are problems in every one of those cities. Atlanta is not perfect. Nashville’s not perfect Charleston, that there’s no perfect utopian city in the United States of America. But those problems require a specific and clear solution to those problems. AG: (32:37) If there’s a nail in your foot, it doesn’t mean there’s RV: (32:40) A nail in every foot. Like the problem isn’t even as a city necessarily. It is a person, a few people, a set of people. And if you can understand who it is, you can proactively handle the problem, which is the truth about any problem in business or our personal life or anything. You can’t. But if you’re blinded by just rage, it’s like you can’t see the problem. All you know is you’re in pain and so you start bandaging yourself and shooting other people and it’s like, Hey, there’s a nail in your foot. Get the nail out. AG: (33:14) Yes. And that’s exactly right. And in problems have levels to them. So, so I, I, you know, my training is social work. When I got my MSW was understanding systems in organizations where you have individual problems, you have group problems, you have family problems, you have organizational problems. And so like when I work with a healthcare organization, I want to understand the problem across the organization. You might have a problem in this department or you might have a problem with this person, right? But is it representative of a systemic problem of how you hire people and who you hire and how you train them and what you allow them to do and what don’t you allow them to do? And what I find more times than not is that people want to solve problems, but they feel paralyzed because they’re going to be punished by a largest system for trying to solve the problem. AG: (34:09) So it requires us to have some level of depth and understanding around what problems are, what our role is, and to solving those problems and going right to the source. As I told my group last night, I said, listen, Mmm. If, if you have police officers who are committing bad acts, okay. Then RDC that the person who can specifically do something about that problem is the police chief that hired them. And if the police chief doesn’t see the problem and doesn’t understand the problem where there’s a specific person who can do something about that person. And that’s the mayor of city manager that hired a police chief. Yeah. And if the mayor and the police chief doesn’t see that problem and doesn’t understand that problem, there’s a specific group of people who can do something about the mayor. And those are the voters who live in that city. AG: (35:07) But if you don’t live in that city, you don’t have the ability to get rid of the mayor. You don’t have the ability to affect the chief of police and you don’t have the ability to affect those officers. Now you can contribute in ways to influence their problems. So going back to the word influence, there are a few things that each of us can control. There are other things that we can influence if we can’t control and if we can’t control it or influence it, our responsibility is to lead. And we, we, we lead by being the example of what we want to see in the world. So if there’s injustice be just, if there’s unfairness, be more fair, if there’s inequity being more equitable. So it’s about what you can control, what you can influence it, where you can leave, but you got to understand the problem. AG: (35:56) And I think so many people haven’t taken the time in this situation to just understand the problem from a societal problem of law enforcement, police and communities, particularly communities of color, two. Our response to when those things happen because I think the main thing, and I’ll say this last point about what happened in, in any of these specific events, it’s not just that we see a bad cop do a bad thing because in every industry there is a bad person that does a bad thing. So you got a bad doctor who does a bad thing. You might have a bad hairdresser that does a bad thing, bad speakers, every industry you can’t fix bad things that individuals do. We can’t control in police individual behavior. The question is when that individual does a bad thing, is there any accountability for that individual? And I think what people are so outraged by is the continued bad things done by certain officers. AG: (37:06) And they rarely get in trouble. They rarely go to jail. The worst thing that happens to them is they lose their job. I mean, think about it. If you murdered somebody and the worst thing that happened to you is that you lost your job. Yep. That’s where is w where the outrage reviews until the conflict. How do we make sure that when bad things happen that we improve the process so they don’t ever have to happen again? Like if you take the airline industry, I’ll give you this, this example. Mmm. We rarely have plane crashes in the United States of America now 35 40 years ago we had a lot of plane crashes, but every time a plane crashes, the entire airline industry works like crazy to find out what happened, to make sure that it never happens again. Like we have four hijackers who crashed planes into buildings, into the Pentagon and nine 11 and there was nobody that was a Homeland security expert on September 10 2011 there was no Homeland security experts, not one. AG: (38:16) But after that day, the entire country, the entire government, every single person began to find a way to make sure this would never happen again. It doesn’t matter why it happened, how we let it happen, we want to investigate that and understand the facts of what led to it. But we’re going to do everything in our power and spend ungodly amounts of money and ungodly amounts of training and hiring new people and changing our processes so that it never happens again. And if we’re going to be good at solving problems when bad things happen or bad people happen, we got to figure out how do we prevent them from ever happening again. And when we don’t see that happening, that speaks to a larger challenge. RV: (39:03) I love that. That, and so, and I need to ask you this question specifically that that parallel is so good. Anton and I, I certainly, you know, even though I’m saying like, Hey, we got to find the facts and things are different in every city, I also very much empathize with when you see Rodney King all the way to where we are now and you see example after example, it’s like, Hey there, there certainly is evidence that there is, there are some systemic problems that need to be dealt with and people need to rally. But even to just know what you shared here of like go to the police chief, go to the mayor and also, you know what I’ve never seen as an article that recounts all of these instances. Yeah. What were the facts afterwards and then what happened to all the officers? RV: (39:50) Right. Like all in one place. You know, I’m thinking to myself like maybe that’s an article I should write is to go show people because once the facts have been revealed, justice should be served and it should be clear and Swift. But, but so anyways, that was so awesome. So much. This is so good. But hold on. I got it. Okay. So I have to ask you this question specifically as it relates to our audience and this, the theme of this podcast being personal branding. You, you’ve mentioned several times, examples of staying in your lane. You spent a part of your life as, as an activist and organizer and being on the streets. But now you’re saying you’re making an intentional choice to stay at home because of various, you know, considerations. Mmm. Do you feel like personal brands should be using their platform? RV: (40:42) Like if I teach yoga, should I be telling them, should I be taking my audience and telling them why racism is wrong? Should I be connecting? It should buy, should I be saying, Hey, that doesn’t, that’s not what my expertise is about. Like how do you balance? Yeah, because a platform is a sacred thing and audience is a sacred thing and the audience that you have didn’t necessarily show up for your opinion on everything that you’re not an expert on. But at the same time, we’re all people, we all have beliefs and as humans we are all in this together. And this, you know, Martin Luther King’s in an injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere, which I fully believe and support. Well, finding that balance between, so do you go, yeah. Tell people what you believe and even if it’s outside of your lane, but you’ve used that term stay in your lane. How do you, how do you find the line? AG: (41:33) Yeah, so, so I think the, the, the summary of how I would explain it and when, I mean stay in your lane is that Mmm, the best brands, the best personal brands are the people who are the most authentic that people connect to intimately. They just don’t know, Oh, what you want to teach them. They know who you are. Like I know who you two are. Okay, I don’t, you might teach me everything I want to know about being a personal brand, but I know who you are. I know how you met and how your relationship started and what you did before you were building a personal brand and your, your, your life story so to speak. So you can’t divorce yourself from who you are if you’re really building a strong personal brand. So my point is staying in your lane, if it’s something that is connected to who you are and what you do, then they find a way to connect it to what’s relevant. AG: (42:26) Because I think one of the things that you teach in personal branding is how do you, how do you take what you do as a personal brand and connected to what’s going on in the world and what people need. And so if you teach yoga, you don’t necessarily have to say racism is bad and that, you know, you know, police brutality is bad. You can say, I know everybody is stressed out right now and the world is stressed and we’re seeing bad things happen all around us. But yoga is a solution to get personal alignment in yourself so you can help get personal alignment in the work. So again, you’ve given some money to say, you know what, I never done yoga in my life, but if something can help me to get this tightness out of my neck because I’m angry at what happened in Minnesota or I’m angry about what happened last month and what happened last year, maybe this is a way that I should try that I haven’t tried before. So if I’m a yoga teacher, that might work, but not, maybe I don’t do anything related to yoga or I don’t run a fitness gym or maybe I teach karate or RV: (43:36) So, but to stick with the, to stick with the yoga thing, if I’m going to follow a yoga instructor. Do you think it’s important that the yoga instructor I’m following is sharing their personal viewpoints on abortion, women’s rights, politics, racism AJV: (43:52) For both of you here, like this is actually something we teach. We say once you know what your problem is, you answered all of the things, all of the questions that are happening in the world through the lens of the problem that you solved. AG: (44:04) Yes. AJV: (44:05) What is your unique lens on whatever the problem is that you saw? Like for me, my personal brain problem is irrelevant, right? I don’t speak on racism or discrimination. I don’t speak on gender equality. I don’t speak on those. But that doesn’t mean that my problem of irrelevance, it can’t be seen through the lens of all these things happening. Not to go out and say, here’s my opinions for the world to hear. But that doesn’t mean it’s not connected to who I am as a human being. Because the problem that I solve is connected to all of these things. It’s just how do you take what’s happening through the lens in which you see things as a personal brand. AG: (44:45) Yeah. So, so you agent you hit is something, and definitely Roy, I’m going to connect to that point. If you’re, if the problem you solve is irrelevance. There’s a lot of people who are feeling very irrelevant right now. Okay? Mmm. Women in the workplace feel irrelevant every day. So, so there, and that’s a problem. And so you can find a way to connect to it. But to Roy’s point about my views on abortion are my views on, you know, X, Y, and Z. My opinion is you don’t have to go there to go there. So like if, if I’m living my truth, if I’m being completely authentic, then it only takes one word or two words in Google, Google, gun and Obama. So you’d Google my name of Barack Obama’s name, then you know my position on healthcare issues, you know my position, well healthcare reform, you might know my position on how do we rebuild the economy, but you don’t know where I stand on abortion. AG: (45:47) You don’t know where I stand on gay marriage, you know where I stand on any of these issues. And those things are personal to me, but they haven’t been the full scope and scale of what I’ve done in my life. But again, if it’s connected to what you’ve done. So if you’re a yoga instructor who had an abortion and it caused you to go down this spiral dark hole in your life and the only thing that pulled you out was that you learned how to do yoga, then maybe it’s okay to connect the dots in that way. But that doesn’t mean you showing up at every abortion rally and trying to give keynote speeches around abortion in America because that’s not your lane. Your lane is yoga. Okay? But your personal story gives you a way to connect to what’s real. So I tell people to be authentic. AG: (46:39) And then the last piece of every influencer that if you got 50,000 Instagram followers or 150,000 or 5 million Instagram followers, I’m pretty sure your local elected official knows who you are. And if they don’t, they should know who you are. So if nothing else, you use your influence to say, Hey listen, I would like to meet with the mayor to understand what’s going on in our community and how it’s similar or different than what’s going on in another community. And so if you can get an education, just say, you know what, we haven’t had a case of police brutality in this city since the mid 1980s well that’s a good thing to say. You know what, this is happening in America and is wrong. But I’m very proud of my city because it’s not happening here. But you should never make that statement unless you know, never, ever, ever talk about what you don’t know because it will make people ask you questions that you can’t answer beyond the surface level. AG: (47:47) So to your point, Rory, doing some research around, you know, the last 25 years or 30 years of police encounters that ended in a death of a person of color and understanding how many it is because it’s, it’s much more than we got on video. I will tell you that much cause I’ve done that level of research. So, but no the answer and then say, Hey, this statistically is a problem and we should be doing something about it and I can’t fix the whole world. I can solve every other problem, but I can talk to the mayor of Nashville. Well I can talk to my city council member or my state legislator and understand what are we doing to prevent this from happening here? And if they give you an answer, be happy and be proud about that. That’s the main point. AJV: (48:36) Yeah. I so agree. And what are the, there was two things that happened over the weekend that prompted me to bring up this interview with Rory cause I really, I really like, I prayed about it hard because we had both been kind of like, okay, yep. What’s our role? Like what’s our role in this? And there was two things that happened over the weekend that I just felt like I thought literally was like, and this is the path for you [inaudible] stuff. The first thing was Whitney Hawthorne, who’s one of our brand builders clients, right? She’s awesome. She’s amazing. And she recently had her son, her second son. And you know, we have two boys and there really close in age. Like our boys are only a few months apart. Both of them. Yeah. [inaudible] She posted something really simple on social media about this newborn baby and however she drafted it, it made me think I will never [inaudible] [inaudible] the fear because she has, AG: (49:36) Do you want I just lost it. Yeah. I saw that post too. And know I think God every day that I had a daughter and a son, and it’s hard to, to, to fathom that to say, you know, you know, God gives you to get the children you want, whatever God gives you. Right. But when I had a daughter, there was an extra sense of relief in me that I didn’t have a son because I know what me and my brothers have gone through with our encounters with law enforcement. And I know that even as a 40 something year old man who’s lives in a suburban nice neighborhood, you know, professional got multiple degrees, I got a great career. Everything is going the way that I wanted to go. The moment I get in my car and just drive to the grocery store, if a cop pulls behind me, my entire physiology changes. AG: (50:44) I break out on a full sweat. I wonder, do I have my driver’s license? I wonder where’s my driver’s license? I don’t put it in my glove compartment. I literally keep it on the visor above my head because I don’t want to reach down or reach into the console and make it think that I’m doing something. I’ll throw my phone on the passenger seat because I don’t want him to think that I have anything in my hands. And so I don’t want to teach my daughter those kinds of things. Yeah. But unfortunately, there’ve been enough cases with women that I’m also having to teach my daughter because it’s happened to black girls too. It happened to Sandra bland. And so, so I don’t want any of this. And I know that there are a lot of people who will never understand this. And, and I, and I’ve been selling into a lot of my friends who I’m not black and no share my experience. AG: (51:36) I’ve been getting text messages from them and they literally have been, Mmm. I don’t know what to say. I want to help. I just want you to know I’m thinking about you and my response to them is that I appreciate you think it about me. I appreciate you caring about me and I appreciate you empathizing with my situation and [inaudible] and that’s all that I can ask you to do. And then if they ask me further, what is there anything I can do to help? I said that the one thing that I believe that you can do to help is you can talk about this because, and talk about this in a way that is, talk about this in places that I can’t go to talk about it. Okay. Mmm. You know, my pastor, I go to an a interracial church and my pastor is white and he is the founder of the church, is a massive church with more than 25,000 members. AG: (52:30) And when he was retiring and handing over the ministry to his son, he says, I’m going to spend the rest of my life in ministry, tearing down the walls of race in America, and particularly in church because Sunday is the most segregated day in America. And so I’m going to use my platform. I’m going to use my influence. I’m going to use my brand power to make sure that we tat on a Rosa wall’s race. And that didn’t mean doing anything visceral and violent. You know what that meant? That meant every time we invited a guest speaker to church, it was a speaker of color. And, and let them come in and preach to the congregation. It means standing up a diversity group and asking Anton to chair to diversity group, it meant going down to the city and asking the mayor, what are you doing to bring people together of color? AG: (53:23) And the mayor is going to respond to him because he’s the of a church with 25,000 people. So again, he didn’t step outside of his lane. He just started asking questions and talking about this in places that I couldn’t talk about it to people who wouldn’t give me the audience to talk about. So it doesn’t have to be big. It could just really be a conversation. No, to be clear, there’s some of us that got to give beyond the conversation because you can talk to somebody and they can continue to do the same behaviors over and over again. And then that means you got to move to the next level of how we change. And, and I think that is warranted where we are right now. But again, there’s so many people who are not talking about it. As I, as I teach the people who live in oblivion. AG: (54:06) Mmm. You know, I, I teach that in the social conscious construct, you got about half of people who are living in oblivion that they didn’t see anything that you saw that pricked your heart and mind and want to have this conversation. They never got a text or a message from their friends saying, why you aren’t saying anything. They just kind of, you know, a happy go lucky move in. And leave it to Beaver land or whatever, and they don’t see anything that’s 50% okay. Yeah. The 35% of them who sees something’s wrong, but they either don’t know what to say or they thank you, somebody else to this problem to solve or they say, little low me can’t do anything about it. And that’s understandable for time, but because you know better, you should know that there’s always something that you can do. The small baby steps lead to the bigger steps, but then there’s a smaller group of people about 10% who literally believe that they benefit emotionally, morally economically, politically from being, staying the way they are. AG: (55:17) Yeah. And we have to find a way to deal with those people, but those people are in the minority. Right. I listened to your podcast religiously, and so when you did the interview with Andy Andrews, and he talked a little bit about his book, how do you kill 11 million people? He pointed out in the book that at the height of the Nazi party, they were only eight and a half million of them when there were 80 million people in Germany. So you had this 10% minority that had control of an 80 million minority. So we got to stop the 10% wherever they are in business, in the world and wherever. But it’s so many more of us on the other side who can do the right thing, it should do the right thing. And that’s what I’m trying to teach is how to become a 5% leader. AG: (56:13) The admired leader who stands up for justice and there’s a laundry list of people, Dr. King Nelson Mandela, Margaret Thatcher, mother. These are people who says, you know what? I’m going to figure out what this problem is and I’m going to use my pulpit, my brand, my platform to figure out what I can do and what mother Teresa could do is not what Dr. King could do. So we’re all different. Well we got to stay in our lane and figure out what we can do to make a difference. And that’s what building the best brand is all about. RV: (56:46) Well you are a 5% leader and this has probably been one of the most enlightening conversations that I’ve had. Amen. And a really, really long that, and it’s just so helpful. I mean, just as a, as a friend Anton, to just hear your voice and hear your perspective on it. And I think it’s such a, a balance of what’s right and not who’s right and just doing what you can and not overstepping your bounds but standing for what is right. I’m just really, really graceful. We love you. We believe in you. Where should people go if they want to connect with you? I mean your, your brand is about leadership and like you, your, your voice man, like this is, this is why you’ve been through everything you’ve been through is like this time in the world right now I think lends itself to somebody just like you at just this moment. AG: (57:42) Well I really appreciate it and I agree. And if people want to connect with me, you can go to Anton Gunn. Com. That’s the home for all things. Anton, I’m on all social media platforms. I love Instagram, but LinkedIn is where I do the most dialogue around helping leaders be better leaders. So please follow and connect with me on LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter. But this is a time for all of us to learn how to grow as a leader and to have a greater impact and be the person who is the difference maker that makes the biggest difference. That’s what we all can do. RV: (58:17) Thank you, Anton. Thanks, buddy. Thank you.

Ep 73: Truly Connecting with and Growing Your Social Media Audience with Sazan and Stevie Hendrix | Recap Episode

Speaker 1: (00:06) [Inaudible]. AJV: (00:06) Hey, welcome to this special recap edition of the influential personal brand podcast. We’re breaking down the interview with as well. What I was going to say, I was gonna say legendary influencers because you think I forgot their names now. AJV: (00:24) I think you forgot their names. I thought you forgot what we were doing. AJV: (00:28) Well that is possible, but I was thinking like legendary, like you know, mega online influencers, massive reputation, early adopters, freaking awesome people freaking awesome and, and not the least of which this isn’t part of my top three, but it frustrates me that there are people as cool and as funny as them. Like Stevie is not funny, which it’s like, I hate people like that. AJV: (01:02) So is Sazan, AJV: (01:02) I know, like, and super fashionable, genuinely funny. It’s like we like you, but you also, you guys kind of sucked too. Like I like jealous and angry that you’re just naturally awesome. Anyway, separate of that. We actually have some useful constructive takeaways from truly an awesome interview. And we do, we love them. We work closely with them. We know them. Everybody that we know that works with them loves them, they’re just awesome. AJV: (01:34) It’s just a recap of how awesome Stevie and Sazan are, so we’ll talk about that for a few minutes. AJV: (01:37) But so my, in terms of my big three takeaways, so my first one was just be early and that was something that, yeah, you know, Saz talked about in terms of like, just knowing, you know, that weird connection with her friend who was dating the founder of Instagram back in the day and you know, basically one of the things where they were talking about like the early you are, the less good you have to be and that right now is tic toc, right? AJV: (02:07) Like that is the world that’s happening. And so I’m going, okay, I don’t understand tick-tock, I don’t like it like it. Well, there’s, there actually are some funny videos on there that. AJV: (02:16) Donald Trump impersonations AJV: (02:19) Yeah, AJ loves the Donald Trump impersonations, but it’s like, man, the earlier you are, the less good you have to be. It’s because that, that was that first one AJV: (02:29) In general. Just the whole concept of you gotta be early to the game. You really can’t be the late adopter and the social media game. You’ve gotta be on that forefront. You gotta be in the early adoption stage. And I’m gonna just figure it out as you go. But to that point, I think that’s really, that’s really good. One of the things that I love, so a minor in any specific order per se, but I love to hear about how they’re killing it on YouTube. I just feel like a lot of our interviews here lately have been like this reemergence of YouTube activities. Yeah. And I love that. And she said, you know, it’s like people find us from Google actually find us searching on Google and find their YouTube videos more than anything else that says something. So just knowing how to title your videos, how to use the descriptions of your videos, I think that’s really a big deal on YouTube. And then the other thing she said, you know, I was like, YouTube is the second highest ranked search engine. So outside of Google it is YouTube and people are really going there for education. So if you’re in more of the how to world, you better be on YouTube. Yeah. That was a really good just aha. Like very straightforward. AJV: (03:42) Yep. Yeah. And we talk about at the phase three event, we talk a lot about the search traffic and on Google and YouTube and you know, I think that that lends to my second one, which was to be trendy, like to be on trend. And they actually talked about, you know, this tool trends.google.com which I was like, gosh, I’ve heard about that. I’ve never once looked at it or paid any attention to it. And to hear them be like, yeah, this is, this is the source of where we figure out what we’re going to make videos on. Which just, it’s like, it’s so simple that it’s so easy to miss, but it’s obvious, right? Like pay attention to what the world is asking for and talking about. And it’s like you don’t even have to be good. You just have to, it’s the difference between like trying to pave a road on some back country highway and get people to come or just go where the interstate is, where all the traffic just is. And so anyways, I thought that was a handy little tool. Trends.Google.Com like I’m going to get into that and pay attention to what people are doing. And then I think relatedly on the trends was like hashtags and realizing that, you know, hashtags, are to social media, what keywords are to search engine optimization. If that light bulb hasn’t clicked for you, AJV: (05:01) You know, make sure you pay attention to that on the interview because that is really, really important to connect those concepts and understand, Oh, this is how people find my on social media is from hashtags. So those are follow trends. AJV: (05:17) Yeah. My second one is this, they spent a few minutes talking about this, but how they have been really afraid to redo content. And then I had this aha moment and Stevie talked about and he was like, Saz, your most, most visited, most viewed videos of all time are beginner makeup tutorials. Why wouldn’t you make more of those? And they had this fear for a long time. Well, I’ve already done that. But if that’s the number one thing that people are finding you for and coming to you for, why not do more of them instead of this concept? Well, I already talked about that this one time. Why not say, actually I’m going to talk about that every time and just increase that exposure. And I think so many of you have this fear of, well, I, I just did a video on self-development a couple months ago and you think you can’t do it again. Where the truth is is you could probably do one every single day and it would only enhance your followers and your engagement versus detract from it. So just a really great reminder of your most visited, most viewed, most downloaded, most commented, most lagged, most whatever videos or posts are the ones that you should do more of. AJV: (06:33) And even just tension to that, like, do you, do you know, do you know what your most viewed visit videos are? Do you know what’s causing people to find you? I mean obviously they’re, they’re super in touch with that stuff. AJV: (06:47) That was just really just, it’s really good information as well as you know, the how to do it. In terms of like the more softer like who you are approach, but it’s also a very tactical approach and I love that. So what’s your last one? RV: (07:01) So my last one, which you might find boring, but it’s like you can’t hear this enough and, and I hope that it sticks when you hear it from people like Sazan and Stevie is be consistent, right? Like I know you probably get sick of us saying it, but it’s like half the battle here is just sticking around. It’s just continuing to hit publish and staying there weekend and week out and day in and day out. And it’s like, on the one hand, I could see how that can be like, you know, discouraging or annoying and be like, yeah, we’ve heard it. On the other hand, it should be super empowering to go. Like all I have to do is keep publishing. I don’t have to, I don’t have to create Nobel prize books, you know, like I don’t have to or ideas or Pulitzer prize books or Nobel prize ideas. RV: (07:48) Like I just have to show up and be there all the time consistently. And if you are late, right? Like if you miss the early train, which I have typically missed the early train on all these platforms just because, you know, I’m like, social media isn’t my favorite thing to do. And I’m trying to not be that with tech talk. I’m trying to just at least be there. But it’s just like show up consistently and just stay there. Social media is not going anywhere. Like this is a part of the rest of our life. It, it’s a part of our life for the rest of our life. It’s changed the world. It’s so ubiquitous. It’s like this is how people consume media. And so you gotta be there and the best time to start up the plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time was today. Same as social media. Like the best time to start a profile would have been 15 years ago, but the second best time is right now. So get on with it and and stay consistent and don’t miss the schedule. AJV: (08:50) That was really long, long winded. RV: (08:52) That was not, that was not long. Three minutes, AJV: (08:56) Not three minutes. Was that three right. And more testing. And the last one I have, and I’ll make mine very short and succinct since mr. Verbose over here took up all my time. But the last one for me is something that stevie said at the very, very, very end, which I thought was so insightful. Did you hear people all the time going, well, I’m just too old for that. I’m just too old for that. I can’t be on tictoc. That’s for kids. And it’s like, well those kids will age those 18 year olds will be 21 year olds and then 25 year olds. And I just thought that was really interesting. It’s like, Hey, you have to go where the people are and if you want to get in and make a difference without all the algorithms coming into play, the time is now, and this is a nurturing environment. AJV: (09:42) It’s not where you come in and you just start selling from day one, just like you wouldn’t in any sort of relationship. Right? You don’t come in and you don’t talk about yourself, you don’t ask them questions there. There’s a process to it. The same thing happens online. It just takes a little longer. There’s this nurturing that happens and the people that you don’t think are your customers today, will be one day, right? So as they evolve, their needs will evolve. And I just thought that was a really good reminder for anyone who was like, Oh, well I’ve already missed that train or I’m too old for this and no, you’re not. No, this is, this isn’t going away. This is only increasing in how we do things. So you better get on it. And then I also loved how he said, if you really feel like you’re just too old, a really great place to start is YouTube. AJV: (10:28) I just think that too is really just a good for God. Can’t be on tick-tock, what am I going to do and tictoc. But it’s just figuring out what the place is for you. But just a great reminder to all of us. It’s like the people on any platform they will grow and evolve and age and their needs will evolve. So were you there in the beginning and are you growing with them? I loved it, but it was really just insightful. RV: (10:53) Yep. And if you’re on YouTube, you can be on tictoc, right? I mean if you follow our content diamond, we’re just going to repurpose. That’s what, that’s what we’re doing, right. our tictoc is just a shortened repurpose part of the video. So my tick talk is right. I don’t know what AJ’s tictok will be all like Trump impersonations and funny dances, but probably something with my toddler for sure. Yes. so you can do it. And here’s the thing, like if you didn’t listen to the interview and you’ve ever wondered, how do you build these huge social media empires, these, these, to have millions of followers on multiple different platforms, sharing their secrets, go listen to the interview and get like, and follow them on Instagram. Yeah, they’re super entertaining. RV: (11:35) But then you’ll know why they have yes, cause they’re more funnier and fashionable than I am naturally. So you can follow that and find out for yourself, but check it out. Thanks for being here. We’ll catch you next time on the influential personal brand.

Ep 72: Truly Connecting with and Growing Your Social Media Audience with Sazan and Stevie Hendrix

Speaker 1: (00:00) Welcome to the influential personal brand podcast. This is the place where you’ll learn cutting edge personal brand strategies from today’s most recognizable influencers. We’re going to teach you how to build a rock solid reputation and then how to turn that reputation into revenue. [inaudible]. I’m your lead host, Rory Vaden builder’s group, hall of fame speaker and New York times bestselling author of take the stairs. Speaker 3: (00:36) Hi, it’s Rory Vaden, and thanks for listening to the influential personal brand podcast. Did you know that the ideas we share on the show are things we actually specialize in helping you implement? If you want to raise your public profile and turn your reputation into revenue, please visit free. Call that brain builders group.com to sign up for a free brand strategy call with one of our personal brand strategist. Again, that’s free. Call dot brand builders group.com to sign up for your free call. Talk to you RV: (01:21) Oh my gosh, you are so lucky to be listening to this podcast today. Let me tell you why you’re about to meet one of the coolest couples ever, Suzanne in Stevie Hendrix. These guys have become friends of ours, their clients, a brand builders group. I consider them mentors like I’m learning so much from watching what they do. They have built a following of millions and millions of people on social media. Their podcast has over 9 million downloads. They get 15 million monthly impressions. They have hundreds of thousands of YouTube subscribers. Design has over a million Instagram followers. Stevie’s got hundreds of thousands of followers. They’re the coolest people ever. Suzanne is just fashionable and Stevie is so funny and I’m a little bit jealous of how young they are and you’re like the cool kids that I always wanted to be friends with that I wasn’t cool enough to be friends with and anyways, thanks for being here guys. Speaker 4: (02:19) That’s like the best intro I think we’ve ever received. Thank you. We take that soundbite from this show and just put it on our website. We’re going to transcribe that on our content diamond, their content diamond, your words. That was, that was amazing. We’re so stoked to be here. Obviously we had you on our show as well and I mean those two shows were packed full of great information. So we’re happy to be here. We consider you a friend and a mentor and a leader for us in an answer prayer. So thanks for having us party. So Speaker 2: (02:54) I mean this seriously, like I am one of those people that I’d like, I feel like I don’t really get social media still. Like obviously we use it for business and stuff, but like I’ve just not been naturally good at it and I’m not super like social anyways. And you guys have built this monster following. How did that happen? Like how did it start? Which platform? How did it grow? How long did it take? Right. Like some people right now are just starting out and they’re going like, okay, like millions of people seems like so far away. Yeah. And just kind of give us a little bit of the journey piece. Speaker 5: (03:26) Yeah. You know, this journey started for me back in 2010 2011 when I was in college and at the time Instagram had been around. And what’s really interesting about Instagram was that, you know, we were studying radio, television, film, and I remember in our news department, one of the producer girls there, her sister or her cousin was dating at that time, the cofounder of Instagram. His name was Mike Krieger. And I remember because we were doing, we had a little commercial talk show that we did that she produced. She was like, I’m going to get him on as a guest. And I hosted this show and I just at the time probably had a thousand followers on Instagram at that time. I mean that was kind of like, I was like, okay, great. But he came onto our show at that time and I’m in just in college and I got to interview him about this platform that really hadn’t taken off. Speaker 5: (04:20) This is when those filters, all you had that was really available to you, where like the Calvin filter and all of those little filters and that was it with the borders and people were just sharing pictures of their dog, their food. It wasn’t really seen as a space where brands were tapping into marketing agencies were looking at, and I just got to ask him some questions. And I think from that interview there was something in me that was really intrigued by social media and I decided to just kind of keep an on with like Instagram. I didn’t know exactly what my brand was per se, but I was just so fascinated by this new way of connecting with people through social media. And I just saw a little bit of that. And so I had a blog at the time, it was a very small blog, but it was my website and I started just practicing some of my copy on there, talking about the trends in beauty and the things that I was passionate about. Speaker 5: (05:16) And then when you fast forward to, you know, after I graduated college and you to Stevie, we decided to move to LA. And that’s where I really realized the potential and the power of social media because I met a lot of local bloggers in LA, which I did not really have that in Dallas and in LA man. I realized these girls are actually making these little side jobs and hustled and it was like a side hustle business and then I got really fascinated by it all and thought if I can start figuring out ways to monetize my blog, this really could become my own virtual business. I just didn’t know the model. I didn’t know how to do it, but I just saw the resources in front of me, which were social media did have an Instagram page that was growing pretty quickly at that time because there wasn’t the algorithm and all of that you see today on Instagram and so I think a lot of it was the timing, you know, being on that platform at the right time, having my blog to actually push some credibility out to like check out my trends, things like that. Speaker 5: (06:18) People started latching on to it and the rest is history. We started our YouTube channel shortly after that and YouTube was really great because I love creating or Instagram. Yeah, it started after my blog and after Instagram. And so I just fell in love with YouTube because we both knew how to edit video. We both knew how to shoot video and the framing when we learned that in college, that’s what we were studying. So I thought, let me take a lot of that knowledge and put it into what I’m trying to create online instead of waiting around for like the NBC to come and hire me to work for them and their company and their platform. And so I just saw that there was this potential, but I just knew I couldn’t do it alone. So Stevie is where, you know, that was kind of the turning point was when like Stevie came on board and we both realized, Hey, if we take this seriously, this could really be our full time job Speaker 4: (07:12) to give you the credit. Because I didn’t take it seriously at first. I remember I was working, I was doing a marketing job where I was kind of traveling the West part of the United States and I was trying to do the acting thing in Los Angeles. And I remember she called me one day and this is in 2014 and she said, Hey, you know, at this point I think you had maybe 150 maybe 200,000 followers on Instagram. And you said, Hey, some of the girls that you know, I’ve met in the blogging space. She said, you know, they’re starting to make real money. And I was like, what are you talking about? She’s like, they are making money, you know, from linking outfits from posting brands X, Y, Z. She said, and they’re making a lot of money. I said, Speaker 5: (07:49) yeah, I remember that. She said, Speaker 4: (07:51) girls are making tens of thousand a month. I said, no, they’re not. She said, yeah, they are. Speaker 5: (07:56) I even told him, I said, there’s one girl making $50,000 a month off of her. At the time it was like, Whoa. I mean, that’s a lot of money. Speaker 4: (08:06) Pool of bloggers who were linking and linking a ton, right? So if you think about how many girls were just going clicking on their links, it makes a lot of sense. But you know, she convinced me, basically you should come back, help me run this social media business full time and let’s see what we can do with this thing. And I have to give her credit because of her foresight, because now the landscape has changed. I mean tech talk is here and people are ready. They are, they have been waiting for that new platform to arise before the algorithm gets super complex and it’s hard to get your face out in front of millions of people. You know, Instagram was a place where people didn’t expect it to have that much power. I think there were a select few and they’ve capitalized early, but even forces on, you know, she had the foresight to realize she needed to continue building her brand and growing these numbers even when we didn’t see any monetary value in it yet. And you know, when I came on and started managing her and helping her with her social media, you know, little jobs began to trickle in, you know, like $300 from target, $500 from so-and-so. And then it started to grow from there. And that’s how it all started. And then we obviously you started Speaker 5: (09:13) and then I will never forget Rory, when Stevie and I, we created our own little tiered package that we would go and target little mom and pop shops on Etsy because at the time these small brands wanted social media exposure and a lot of the times just some high res images of their products. And so we created this little business model, you know, where it was like, Hey, we can offer you the platinum package, the silver package, the gold package, which you’re going to get all of these assets if you do that. And I remember the most expensive one, we were charging like $500 and we thought, Oh my God, no one’s gonna like buy that. And we were thinking, Oh my God, that is so expensive. Like let’s just hope and pray. And all these brands just kept coming back. We’ll do the $500 we’ll do the $500. So we were constantly readjusting our rates and learning as we grew and as we sharpened up our skills. So that’s where it all started. Yeah. And it’s just evolved and changed so much. Speaker 2: (10:10) So right there. And I love that. You know, that’s so similar. Like people ask me about my speaking fee these days, right. And like, you know, it’s tens of thousands of dollars. It’s, it’s up there. But like my first gig was 50 bucks, my second was 500 and it was like, you just get so good at what you’re doing and it starts small. And what I love is, you know, like people always talk about charge what you’re worth. And I always tell them, don’t charge what you’re worth. Charge what you can get and like charge something that’s such a no brainer for people to buy from you. And then as the demand increases, then you can raise just like let the price raise itself. And I didn’t realize that part of your story. That is so, so cool. We had people literally Speaker 4: (10:51) that would, you know, email us because when I came on board, you know, it was like size had four hands basically. And another, another mind on her working on her business. So, you know, I was now the gateway between her and the brands. I was emailing the brands back. I had no idea what I was doing, but I was like, I’m going to manage her. And I said, how much should I charge? You know? And literally I had to figure this thing out from scratch. You know, I started emailing brands back and like you said, trying not to be greedy or pushy and you know what I mean, but also standing firm and what we felt like our value was based off of the demand. Right? So it’s like so-and-so gave us a thousand dollars to do the same thing. You know, and you’re asking for just as much or more. Speaker 4: (11:28) So you know, that’s fair. And I would have brands that would email me six months later and be like, want to work with SAS again at the same rate? And I go, she has 150,000 more followers now than she did then. And it’s different because, you know, I remember talking to a friend who was a mentor at the time and has a really great mind for business and managing clients and he said, you’re not charging for your time. You’re charging for your audience. He said, and so it doesn’t matter how much it takes you. You said how many more followers do you have now? And you need to based on that information, the engagement, et cetera. Speaker 2: (12:00) Yeah, so I love that. I mean that’s like the super bowl commercial, right? It’s 30 seconds, but you paid 5 million bucks because you’re in front of such a huge number. I love that. So how do you get a lot of followers, right? Like I know that’s just such an obscure question, but like you guys have done it consistently. You got 9 million podcast downloads, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook now tick talk, which I want to talk about here in a little bit, but like you’re doing it so consistently across all these platforms. Why do you think that is? Like there’s millions of people they could be following. Why are they following you? No offense. Speaker 4: (12:41) We both have our own angle to answer that question. And I actually want to talk about this earlier, so I’m glad you brought it up. So right now, and I know we want to talk about tech talk, I’m just gonna bring the tech talk is here, right? Tech talk is happening right now and it has been happening for awhile now. I remember somebody told me about it a year and a half ago on a trip in Europe we were at, she was like, you know she’s a foreign girl. She’s like, you should try the cheek talk. It’s very good. Not a lot of Americans doing it, but they’re paying lots of people on the platform. You need to try. And I was like, thank you. What’s your accent? I can’t remember where it was from. But anyways, I remember at the time thinking, what is this tick tock jibberish she’s talking about, I wish I had listened and you who are listening now listen to this, jump on this platform now. Speaker 4: (13:22) And I want to say that because to gain followers, and I told this, this is on the tech talk platform is very young. I think there’s a lot of 18 year olds on there who are, you know, even from our age being just 30 they think so differently than we do. Her little brother’s 19 they just think they react differently to humor and things like that. But I said to Sam, I said, we need to get on this platform. And I said, and we need to follow the trends. And we didn’t really do this on Instagram. I think Instagram was a lot of vulnerability, blood, sweat and tears, effort, effort, effort. I said with tech talk, I said, this platform is so young, it’s so fun. It’s so trendy. And so it kind of goes against the idea of like staying true 100% to your brand. Speaker 4: (14:10) And I told, as I said, I said, I think what we need to do is both, I said, we need to follow the trends, but we also need to present like our brand and our mission statements people, right? So it’s like we’ll have a video where people would do a ton of dances on tech talk, we’ll do dances or we’ll do you know, members, women, you know, common things that one person is going to see and be like, I relate with that 10 people are going see to be like, I relate with that a hundred people. Everyone relates with that. So do common things. I would say if you want to start growing things that people can commonly relate to, don’t be a hipster. Don’t be somebody who’s like, I have my own way of thinking because people, me too hear common languages common, you know what I mean? Speaker 4: (14:52) Things they can understand. Because if you are too, too niche or, or the way in which you present things is too outside the box and not easy to digest. I don’t think you’re going to gain a lot of followers. You might gain it a niche of strong followers, but in some ways you have to water down, right? Like even if it’s comedy is your thing. Make your comedy digestible for everyone in middle America because then you will start to gain followers. But like you say, Rory, you know the she hands wall, it’s like you’re going to gain gain, gain followers. Once you get them to love you in a sense on social media, then you present your mission, what you’re really about. And I think you do it along the way. I think people will pick up, Hey, he’s a pretty nice person. Like he’s talked about this or that or I know they do a lot of humor, but there’s something sweet and down to earth about them. Right? Once you get them to love you, you gain a bunch of followers. You present them like Speaker 5: (15:45) and was like, this is what you need now. Like I’m going to deliver you something that you need that you didn’t realize that you needed. You know? And that’s where social media can be a really powerful tool. I’m just gonna piggyback off of everything you’re saying cause I completely agree. I think part of it is timing, but the other part of consistently growing with your audience is the consistency of what you’re putting out there. And a lot of people have that instant rise, right? With social media. And Instagram and we see them grow really fast at the beginning and then it goes down like this because they’re not able to keep their audience and that’s what’s tough too is sometimes when you grow so quickly you will reach a point where you’re just like, okay, I’m plateauing. It’s like I need to keep this audience and that’s really when it becomes a priority to center everything that you do really around what your audience does need and catering to their needs. Speaker 5: (16:40) Because for us, we say that everything that we do, we do it because we love connecting with people and that all the things that we put out, we try to put it out with purpose. Even a silly video that we do, we put it out in hopes that yeah, we hope that it brightened up your day a little more. We hope that it made you laugh. We hope that this video was a sweet escape from maybe your harsh reality you’re in and all of that to say we constantly think about something we learned in college, which is the idea of like what’s in it for them. Everything we put out, we have to think about that. It’s not about us. Even though we’re on the social media stage, you, if you can always point back to your audience and make them feel a part of the community, you’re going to continue to grow. And it may not be as fast once you reach a really increased pace, but then it’s about keeping that audience that you have built. And I think that’s the age that we’re living in right now in social media. It’s not about how quickly can I hit a million followers. It’s about how can I engage the community that I already have and keep that community. And then over time you will see growth. Speaker 4: (17:44) And I just want to add one final point, like to that connectivity that you talked about, you know, really with your audience, you know, it’s so important, but also, Oh gosh, I just lost it. Wow. I just lost it. I had a really good, Speaker 2: (17:57) that’s all right. It’ll come back. It will come. It’ll come back to me. Yeah. That’s an interesting concept there about like, you know, get the followers first, you know, kind of have a broader net to get them Pharrell and then you know, kind of work into telling them more about what you do. That’s just a really high level strategy is, is super interesting. So I want to talk about video for a second specifically because I mean at this point hopefully everybody knows like video is pretty much the thing that matters. It’s like where the whole internet is going. Everything is video, video, video, video. And we did an interview with Michael Stelsner, the founder of social media examiner and he just totally hammered on all the data and trends pointing so aggressively and heavily towards video. And y’all edit your own videos still, right? Speaker 4: (18:49) Yeah. Yes. Okay. That actually kind of goes back. That reminds me, what I was going to say is that connectivity is so important connecting with people. But I think also people really recognize service like when you’re doing a service or when you are serving or when you were putting effort in. So one part of that is connecting. It’s the effort that you put into connect with people, right? But a lot of the times like you’ll see people that bust through because they just put the effort in the work into putting up their videos. There’s guys who have millions of followers on Instagram and tick tock who are not funny at all. They’re not funny at all. But guess what? They edit three videos a day and they make it very simple and very common and they’re getting comments and they’re getting shared and they are pumping out content and they are serving and people see their effort. Speaker 4: (19:42) And like I said, it’s digestible, it’s simple. It relates to the every person, every man, every woman, and they’re getting tons of followers. Whereas the person who’s putting in mediocre effort, mediocre service and a little bit of connectivity, they’re not going as far. And so you really, I think when it comes to editing your videos to breeze in it, we still edit our own videos is because there’s an understanding that we have of our content that no one else you can quite get except for us. And we can train somebody to get it close. But there is something when you edit your own video, the timing, the understanding of the content and how it should splice together, that is so important. It’s almost like a comedic actor. You can have a great, if you’ve ever been on set or if you’ve ever been, you know in the movie business you can do a really funny scene, but the editor is the one who decides which cut he’s going to take and how he’s going to cut it and the timing of that. And that has so much to do with how funny that scene is. Right? And so that’s why we edit our own videos because we know like we’re going to maximize our connectivity by editing our own videos. Yeah. So, and I want to hear about that. Like what does the video editing process like? What do you think is the key to a good video? You know, like what are just some of the more fundamental things I guess that Speaker 4: (20:57) people need to know. Like you know when you’re putting together your plan, you need to make sure these five things are in place. Speaker 5: (21:05) Yeah, I think the first thing we can do this together. I think the first thing is know the platform that you’re posting it on. You know, this is similar to even your content diamond. You know that a YouTube video is going to be different than a quick one minute video you’re creating for the Instagram audience, which attention spans even shorter than the YouTube audience. We already know that the internet in general is going to be a very distracted community because even on YouTube, that person watching you, they may have five tabs open already on their computer. So you have to even think about how am I going to grasp their attention on this platform? And then on the other platforms you have to run that same question through your mind. Tic talk is even quicker than Instagram for that generation who just graphs that information super quickly and they want it sliced and diced a certain way. But you can take one video and you can do all of those different effects but for catered for that specific platform? Speaker 4: (22:07) No, I agree 100% I think it totally depends because you know obviously you have one minute videos on Instagram and TechTalk and then you have TV and then you also have you know YouTube which can go as long as you want it to go. But even on YouTube, I mean specifically YouTube is a platform that I really feel like is for somebody who is, they feel a little bit old for social media maybe, but they still want to tap into it. YouTube I feel like is still a great place to tap into the social media market and a place I think you still can grow. Like I said, tech talk as well. Obviously it’s a very young platform but YouTube I think because it’s the number two search engine behind Google. So when people are searching for things, they’re searching for expertise. How to YouTube is so popular and also too YouTube still rewards people who post consistently. Speaker 4: (22:56) So if you are posting consistently, you know, two videos a week is kind of the recommended. If you want to grow, you need to be posting two videos a week. You can still grow on YouTube. So I think you know, when you’re editing for YouTube, what I would recommend is three to eight minutes, maybe 10 at the max. There’s a creator named David doebrick and he does a ton of videos blogs and he is huge, but his videos are all very, very short. And I think what he’s done is just hack the algorithm as far as I’m going to put up videos that are short, people are going to watch the full thing. I’m going to be rewarded on YouTube behind the scenes because it’s going to show that my watch time is a hundred percent right. And then they’re just going to roll onto my next video. So you could be creating a three part video, you know where it’s two minute, two minute, two minute, and they’re just rolling one video to the next. And YouTube is seeing, Oh my gosh, they put up three videos and they have a hundred percent watch time on all of them. Speaker 5: (23:50) Yeah. We just actually went on, we went on my YouTube analytics, which that wasn’t around like you know, several years ago when I started, but YouTube has built this back end page for creators to really see how their videos are performing on various levels from at what point do people click out of your video, a specific video they left at this marker and I look at that and like, yeah, I started going off on a tangent there. I mean they really do help you refine and kind of figure out what that perfect video is for your audience on the platform. But something that I saw recently was the people that are coming to my YouTube channel, the number one place that they’re coming from is Google. They are actually finding my content and discovering me from Google now Instagram and miscellaneous is what they call it, which is usually social media. Speaker 5: (24:39) That was like number six or seven and I push a lot of my content on Instagram and drive it to YouTube a lot thinking that that’s where I’m getting a lot of that attraction. But the truth is, is when you upload a video on YouTube from your title to the description, you treat that as if it’s a blog post, because those key words are going to be transferred and related onto the Google platform for SEO. And so when you create a content, a video like for me how to do makeup for beginners, there’s actually a site that I use. I go on trends.google.com I can specifically search what people are looking for on YouTube. I type in the keyword makeup and I can now see across the world people are Googling makeup for beginners. So all of a sudden I just got a really great video idea. Speaker 5: (25:28) I’ve been doing this for the past year, working closely with the trends as well as the content I want to create, but I package it in a very SEO friendly way and I have seen incredible results and it’s no wonder why number one is coming from this outside world and they’re now discovering who says on is and now they’re following my Instagram and they’re following our podcast, but they came from Google, which is an unknown platform for us that we don’t always tap into, but this new audience is now coming from YouTube. So YouTube, like Stevie said, is definitely powerful. Speaker 4: (26:03) Well also too, don’t be afraid, and this is a big thing that we’re still trying to learn how to get over. Don’t be afraid to repackage content because just like she said, beginner makeup on YouTube, it has been at the top of the trend search. It just sits there. It stays there, but it stays there. All of your videos have performed super well and you’re like, should I do another beginner’s makeup? The answer is yes, because guess what? You’re getting a ton of views on it. Speaker 5: (26:31) People want to learn on YouTube, they want how to, yes, Speaker 4: (26:34) easy makeup, beginner’s makeup, simple glam, like just continue to do some of that content that does super well, that evergreen stuff. Just repackage it, retool it a little bit and represent it in a different way. And don’t be scared to do that. Be thinking I have to come up with something super unique every time when if it’s working for you and the algorithm is rewarding you for it. I would say keep going with it. Speaker 2: (26:58) Yeah, and I think that’s an interesting thing about Google and search engine optimization in general is it’s like what usually performs well is the really simple concept. The really simple question. It’s like what you were saying earlier, Stevie about it’s the thing that everybody is searching for and it’s like, it’s not rocket science stuff. It’s like the common everyday person. So I want to talk about hashtags for a second because I never have really understood hashtags. And then I accidentally said this to somebody a couple of days ago and I was like, actually I think maybe that’s it, but I don’t know cause I don’t, I don’t actually follow them closely enough. As I said, hashtags are to social media. What key words are to search engine optimization. Do you agree with that? Do you not agree with that? And then just like how in the heck do we use hashtags? Like without Ben an hours and hours? Like figuring them out? Speaker 5: (27:56) Yeah, that’s a great question. I think, yeah, like you said, hashtags are the key words I think on every platform. You know YouTube, they call it something different like alternate tags. But YouTube has a tic talk has it, Instagram has it and it’s a great way to get your content exposed to a particular audience. It’s more niche. So you have to be kind of specific and selective with your hashtags. I’ve learned that more is not more, in fact, you should just do less is more. But just be very specific with it. And also when you’re looking at the hashtags, see how that hashtag in itself is performing. So if I know that there’s a better hashtag I could be using, Speaker 2: (28:36) how do you know how it’s performing? Speaker 5: (28:38) So like for example on tick-tock, if me and Stevie did a video cooking and I’m beginning to type in the hashtag and I type in hashtag healthy when you click healthy it’s going to pop up immediately. It’s going to have a drop down box of all of the hashtags right now that are trending with the word healthy in it. And so some of them don’t make sense. Like let’s say it was like healthy body or let’s say it was like, and our specific thing was a recipe and it said like healthy dog, like that wouldn’t make sense but it’s healthy recipes is getting 250 million people under that hashtag. Then I’m like for sure let’s go with that one. So tick talk that’s, Speaker 2: (29:16) so this is just the search tool, like whatever the basic search tool is natively in the platform, type in whatever you kind of think and then just pay attention. It’s like typing into Google search bar, how it makes suggested like search terms based on volume, Speaker 4: (29:33) right? What I’ve heard with tech talk so far is that tech talk is a little bit different than Instagram to where if you hashtag your hashtags will directly Speaker 2: (29:42) put you into a pool, a select pool of say like 150 people, right? So you post a video, you have 10 followers on tech talk, right? You post a video. Well, I have 52 followers on [inaudible] and they’re Hendricks is our one of my tick-tock followers. So yeah, no, I, dude, Hey, when I said to you, I didn’t mean to you, I was talking to you, not you Speaker 4: (30:08) followers on tick-tock, right? And you have a hilarious video with your daughter. You’re not going to hashtag basketball, you’re going to hashtag daddy daughter another one that’s popular or maybe even a trending hashtag. There’s trending hashtags on tech talk that you can see. But basically maybe you could say cute girl or something or cute baby and you put that out there, right? And people that are interested in cute babies on tick tock, 150 of them are going to see it. And then if those 150 it performs well out of them, it’s going to send that to a larger pool. And if it performs there, it’ll send that to a larger pool. Speaker 5: (30:41) And it all depends on what that person was already interested in. So tick tock has, you know its own and Instagram had their own algorithms, like if my homepage is going to look different than yours on Instagram because maybe on mine I’ve just been engaging with tons of recipe accounts. So Instagram automatically is going to try to appeal those specific accounts to me and take talk is doing the same thing. So if you’re engaging in liking funny videos right now, they’re going to bring you more and put you in those specific pools. And then if you’re the creator, they see how well you do in that pool. And if you do well you go to a bigger pool and a bigger pool and a bigger pool. So the hashtags are actually very important. I wouldn’t overlook them. I would definitely utilize them for each platform. Speaker 4: (31:25) I want to go make a point, worry about kind of what we talked about on our podcast earlier with you about procrastination. I think a lot of people, they neglect social media. Just, it’s almost kind of like they procrastinate on social media. We all know that we could be using social media, whether you get a thousand followers or you get 10 million followers. I just told my parents, you know, they started their Instagram, I don’t know, six months ago and it’s been performing really, really well. They’re getting good engagement now and I told them years ago to start it Speaker 5: (31:53) and they have a flooring store. It’s a foreign store. Yeah, right, right Speaker 4: (31:56) there in round rock, Texas and they have a flooring store and they were like, we don’t need that. That’s, Oh yeah. And I said, you need to start one. I said, it’s important. Even if it doesn’t bring you new business, it can basically for you where people can go on your Instagram and go, wow, they have really good taste. Actually we want to work with them. And maybe they found you another way. I said, but it is such an important tool. So whether you have 500 or 5 million, it doesn’t matter. I think it’s so important to start, you know, the biggest advice we can give to people who are sitting here like, Oh my gosh, how am I going to do all this and all these hashtags and all of this kind of stuff. Get content up. Don’t worry about how funny. I mean you would be surprised how many low, I would say more quality videos go viral than high quality videos. Speaker 4: (32:42) I mean, have you ever noticed how many terrible quality videos from webcams and stuff like that go viral? I mean it’s, it’s amazing. So I just want to encourage anyone out there who’s like, okay, I need to get on this social media thing. It’s almost like what you talked about with procrastination. That’s fear, right? That fear is actually the thing that keeps us from starting. And that’s the same for so many of us. And I’m, I’m even talking to myself because years ago when the algorithm for Instagram was favorable, when I had maybe a couple thousand followers, aye, you started posting a couple videos that Sal’s encouraged me to do. She was like, you need to post more funny videos. I posted these videos and one of them has like 500 comments. If I got 500 comments now and I have about 128,000 followers back then, I probably didn’t even have 10,000 if I get 500 comments down, I’m like, Oh my gosh, that was my best video ever. Speaker 4: (33:35) You see what I’m saying? And so the point I’m trying to make is that if I could go back to earlier, you are, the less good you have to be is kind of like what it feels like a hundred percent because the platform is so fresh. It’s so new. People are excited. They’re ready to just discover and be a part of it and they’re excited about that. Whereas now, you know with Instagram it’s like when Instagram started it was like beautiful coffee photos, photos of where I am. You know, full little photos and now it’s like what is that? Speaker 5: (34:05) Right? I think nowadays people are also really hard on themselves. Everybody thinks they need to figure out like their personal brand and aesthetic before they start in sign up on a social media platform. But the goal should be not that you have to know exactly what content you’re posting and how you’re going to do it, but the goal should be, I’m on social media and the purpose is because I need to connect with people. I need to grow an audience because I ultimately want to cater to that audience with this genius product that I want to develop or whatever. The goal is to get people connected to you, to get them in front of you and however you have to do that in the beginning, I guarantee you no matter what, that’s going to change and evolve as your audience grows and changes and evolves. Speaker 5: (34:51) So even if you think you have it all figured out and you start out and you’re like, I’m just going to do this Monday, Tuesday, Wednesdays, I’m putting out this content that no matter what, I’ll tell you right now, social media, every day it grows and it changes and you got to kind of jump with the next wave. Not to let that scare you, but for that to encourage you that you don’t need to have all the answers, whether you’re an expert or not at social media, you just need to be on it and you need to be present and your goal should be, I just need an audience to connect with because then I can actually sell to them. Ultimately, whatever it is you’re trying to package and sell. So that’s the thing with social media that’s different than a lot of other traditional things where yeah, you could do a speaking engagement, you could go do something, a keynote somewhere, and now you’re on a stage, hundreds of people listening to you. Speaker 5: (35:39) But that’s a different audience. The social media world, their attention spans, they’re already doing a bunch of things. You just need to get them to do this. Like you need to get them to stop and just notice you however that needs to be. Let it be authentic to who you are. Don’t try to do comedy if that’s really not your thing, but just get their attention and once you get that attention going, man, then you can start getting more strategic as time goes on and really cater and package to them. You know, whatever you’re trying to sell. Speaker 2: (36:09) I love it. There’s so much here. I think it’s just awesome to kind of get behind the scenes of the way that y’all, you just even how you think about it and approach. It is so cool and insightful. I do have one more question for you before that. Where do you want people to go if they want to connect with the is, see how you do your thing and learn about your family. Of course, you know, says like Stevie, your videos are hilarious as you’ve got all sorts of lifestyle, makeup and fashion and you know stuff. Where would you point them? Speaker 5: (36:42) Well, we’re currently working on our joint website, which we’re really excited about. sun.com you know, we’re working on that, creating that Hendrix home online, but in the meantime you can obviously go to our Instagram pages. Like if you go to my Instagram at Suzanne, you’re going to see in my bio pretty much our whole life spilled out. In a nutshell, you’re going to see our podcast, you’re going to see a link to my YouTube channel. You’re going to see a link to his page on Instagram as well as our family page. So Instagram is probably a good place to start. And then we’ll let you kind of branch out depending on whatever you guys like to go listen to our podcast or go on my YouTube channel for tips and all of that. But Speaker 2: (37:18) I always call it tell people, I say, go to Suzanne’s Instagram, you’ll see everything there. Even me, I’ll be tagged in many ways. Speaker 5: (37:24) Yes. And then our, our newest platform that we just dipped into, which we’ve been talking a lot about is tick-tock. So if you want to check that out, that’s our joint page. We’re just doing one page and it’s been really fun. So that’s our family account at the Hendrix’s and you can check that out. But brace yourself cause this guy here does some hilarious, crazy videos. Speaker 2: (37:43) The best thing the has brought is a time to do. Speaker 5: (37:47) It’s in us. Yeah. Speaker 2: (37:49) So my last little question for you is just where do you see all this going? What are the trends you’re paying attention to? I mean obviously we’ve talked a lot about Tech-Talk that’s like our chance to get in right now while it’s still relatively early. But in general, are there any other like major trends you would highlight and you know, do you think social media is always going to be here? Do you think Facebook’s going to disappear one day? Do you think like it’s only going to be videos and images will disappear or like anything at all? Like just in your head space, like you guys are in this all the time. What are you thinking about and paying attention to related to the future of social media? Personally, I feel like just just as humans, I mean even in, you know, go back through the history, we’ve Speaker 4: (38:35) gone through so many ups and downs and so many different trends and styles and lifestyle types that I think that all things have a place and just in different time, you know, whereas images now are less sacred than they used to be. In my opinion. Images used to be so much more sacred, you know, powerful pictures. You know, you go on Instagram now and the beautiful thing about Instagram is that it empowered everyone to become their own photographer and to do their best and to put it out there for the world to see, which at the same time kind of devalued. You know what I mean? Truly beautiful pictures. Even though there are those that stand, I think in the upper echelon, you know, that’s really hard to reach. At the same time, we’ve been numb to that, you know? But I believe that at some point the beauty of photography and the appreciation for true great photography will come back. Speaker 4: (39:24) But I don’t know when. My thought right now though with TechTalk, you know, is that you’re connecting with a super young audience who is super fun and they want to laugh. You know what I mean? They want those quick, gratifying giggles, you know what I mean? And so what we’re doing is we’re jumping on the platform and we are riding that way. And you even said to me the other day, baby, you said, you know, this just makes me feel really young. And I think what people love about social media and like tech talk right now, is that everyone around the world has the same feeling about it without even talking to each other. There’s this buzz, there’s this fun, there’s this hype of like there’s a new platform. Everyone’s jumping on. We’re figuring it out. There’s this buzz around it right now, but I believe that social media in some way will always continue because of the connectivity to that brings the world. Speaker 5: (40:15) Yeah. We’ve seen that during this time right now with the Corona and the crisis, you know, social media is the one place that’s bringing people together. In a sense it has become home for a lot of people who weren’t even active on social media prior to this crisis. But people are looking for connection and now is the time to really rise and to use your voice and your platforms in any way that you can. And like with anything in life, you don’t know what the future holds. You only know who holds the future. And I just believe that social media is a space where I feel like God has allowed us to not only share our life and the beautiful photos that we take of our daughter and our of our content, but it’s also been a stage for us where we can actually share our voice. Speaker 5: (41:05) And I don’t think social media is going to ever just disappear. It’s going to continue to grow and evolve, but so are we as humans. And I think we’re going to be able to handle that change when it comes. So I’m excited for the future of social media, but I’m also excited for our future to not only be on rented real estate, Rory as you’ve trained us and to actually build the Stevens is on home that we are right now virtually and to actually bring our online into this virtual home and we’re doing it alongside brand builders group, which has been awesome and we just can’t wait to see what that future holds. Speaker 4: (41:42) One quick point babe, that I do want to say is that we have seen this on Instagram, right? It’s the only thing you can really compare to tech talk the audience and what they want will mature. So right now it’s super young, super funny, super goofy, right? Instagram is not what it was before. So what people want and what they’re looking for will mature. Just like the age, the average age of a tech talker, right? Say if it’s like 19 years old, five years from now, their desires at 25 year old is looking for is different than a 19 year old what they’re looking for. So if you’re somebody who’s like, I’m too old for this. If you gather 15,000 followers and you have a thousand followers that are super loyal to you in five years from now, they’re going to be 25 30 years old, what are they going to be looking for that you can provide them at that time? And so that’s why it’s important. Speaker 2: (42:36) I love that. Well you guys, you are so awesome. As I say, it’s like I feel honored to work with you and to be your friends and to be a part of what you guys are doing. I think God has a huge plan for your life and already making such an impact. And I love how you’re using these tools to bring the good life, which is the name of the podcast and you know, to people and, and really use it for encouragement and stuff. And so anyways, we just want to encourage you and thank you and we wish you all the best. Speaker 5: (43:05) Thanks Rory. Tell AIG we said hi. Speaker 2: (43:09) That’s all we’ve got for this episode of the influential personal brand podcast. But here’s some great news, one of the most valuable things you can do to help us. And other new potential listeners to find. Our show is for you to both rate this show and leave a review. So as a special bonus for you, if you leave us a comment in iTunes, Stitcher, or wherever you listen, take a screenshot of your review and email it to [email protected]. We will give you free lifetime access to 25 of our most popular interviews on video in your own private members only area. Speaker 4: (43:49) So go right now, rate us, review us, and then send a screenshot of it into [email protected] and we will get you set up with free lifetime access to our most popular video interviews all in one place. Also, please just share, share, share this podcast with anyone who you think might enjoy it. And until next time, remember that building a business isn’t nearly as valuable as building a reputation

Ep 71: Putting the ‘Real’ Back into Reality TV with Mike Johnson | Recap Episode

RV: (00:06) Welcome to this special reality TV recap edition of the influential personal brand podcast that was different. A reality TV star, mega star, Mike Johnson from the Bachelorette and I, I mean, I, I’ll say this, I want to get his insights on what he had to share, but you know, he came to one of our events here not that long ago and people were freaking out, freaking out, snapping pictures with him, interrupting the conversation, strangers, not even part of our group party walking up and been like, can we take a picture? AJV: (00:48) All, all the ladies. RV: (00:49) But Mike is such a really great guy and he’s super likable. Obviously he’s done really, really well on the show. And I don’t know, it was interesting to hear about reality TV as a part of building your personal brand. AJV: (01:02) Yeah, it was fascinating. And I would say that I would love to say that, Oh, we were, you know, super fans and I was a fan girl, but I don’t watch reality TV, so I didn’t have a lot of context for why exactly does America love him so much? But he’s a super, super lovable guy. I think you guys will see a lot of why he was so popular on the show by listening to the interview by itself. But yeah, this is not new. But I feel like one of the biggest messages that he shared, which is something you’re going to hear from so many people that we interview, it’s just be yourself. He said, be your authentic self. And he goes, I think one of the reasons that I was really likable on the show is I was being myself and he goes, I was just keeping it real. AJV: (01:52) Like I was wearing my doo rag when it was time to wear my do rag and I’m a nice guy. So I was a nice guy on the show and I just, I think all of that is something that we hear all the time about how do you actually be yourself and in his unique case when there’s 20 cameras around, how do you keep it real? Like how do you actually be yourself? And I think to me, I really related to it in terms of how we are on social media, right? So many people use way too many filters. Like I see some of my girlfriends post pictures and I’m like, wait, is that them? I can’t tell because there’s so many filters, they’re almost unrecognizable and there’s this whole concept of be you, but yet not quite the real you be you, but a little bit altered a little bit. This don’t be afraid to be too vulnerable. We don’t want to come across as weak, but you know, you want to make sure you’re fun and you’re lively and engaging and it’s like, well, sometimes it’s just not you. So how do you really be you? And I thought he gave some really great insights and feedback on how to do that in a very intense, a really intense session in terms of doing it for live TV. RV: (03:08) Yeah, for sure. Well, and even just the hearing, the selection process of, of how they grab people for the show, right? So there’s all of these, these different rounds I guess, of, of editing or selection that they go through. And I think, you know, they’re looking for characters, like they’re looking for characters because they know that, that that strong characters, strong personalities create great TV. And I think that translates specifically to personal brands is like you, you have to be a strong character. You have to be like this amplified version of, of who you are. Or it’s just, it’s not really amplified. It’s, it’s more of like uninhibited or accessible or exposed. And I think, well authentic is a word you would use, you would be able to use for it. But Mike, Mike is acting as if no camera is there. And so he is being his personality as if no camera is there. RV: (04:13) Allowing people to see, okay, as a personal brand who’s presenting on camera, you have to get comfortable with the camera being there. Like you have to be comfortable being yourself, even though there is a camera. I remember one of my speaking mentor saying, you can’t be great on stage until you’re comfortable on stage because you’re going to be so consumed with being awkward and nervous and uncomfortable that you can’t even focus on connecting to the audience. You can’t even deliver a message or instruction or inspiration because you’re not being yourself. You’re consumed with this awkwardness and you know, so, so being able to be that person in your own skin and being okay with people seeing like the full heightened version of you, even when you’re making out with somebody. I mean that’s, that’s very extreme, but I think that that is, is part of the lesson is just being comfortable with, AJV: (05:06) Yeah, and I think like too that, that’s such a great point because I was, I’m laughing inside because we have so many clients in the brand builders community who are camera shy. I mean, they are incredible business people. They’re super successful entrepreneurs. They’re authors, they’re, amazing content creators. They’ve done incredible things. But yet the camera goes on and it’s like [inaudible] crickets. It’s like, hello, are you there? Okay. Hello? Is it still you? And it’s just like this weird thing where as soon as the camera comes on, they’re like too professional or they try to be too perfectionist and they try to write out a script for what they’re going to say on camera. And then, Oh, I messed up a word, got to do it again. And it’s like, y’all, you gotta be able to turn the camera on, makeup on, off in your case cloth, done cloth on, done AJV: (06:02) Off on. AJV: (06:04) But it’s like you gotta be able to turn on the camera and just go, no script, no planning. And in many cases, no being dressed up, no makeup, if that’s kind of how you now have your super glam and that’s your brand, then do your thing, girl or man, either way. But I just to that point, it just kind of like was laughing inside because you do have to be comfortable on camera, especially in today’s age to have a successful personal brand. But yet, I know that some of you who are going to listen to this podcast, if we were to turn a camera on you right now and go, all right, say your piece. You’d be like, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa. Give me a minute, let me write something down. Let me make an outline. And it’s like, no, speak your truth and do it regardless. Right. To turn the camera on and go. And I think that to me in my opinion anyways, being on reality TV, Shirley is, I’m sort of training for that. But even Mike told us, he goes, Oh my gosh, I’m so nervous on this podcast interview. AJV: (07:09) Yeah, that was funny cause he wasn’t, he’s not used to being on podcasts, but here he is on TV. No, no problem. So it’s a different medium. I think it’s just, you know, the first time you do a podcast, even if you’re a professional speaker, like you get a little nervous, you know, the first time you do a speech on stage, you get a little nervous. Right? Or, or even if you’ve been a speaker, you stand in front of a, an a camera and you do like a TV shoot or you know, like a movie shoot or commercial something. It’s different in different set or shown up. I remember the first time I did a live news, you’ve done this the morning like the morning shows. It is, it isn’t. It’s a different environment and you have to just be able to trust that you as you are is good enough and to just sit and allow people to experience who you are and be okay if they like you be okay if they don’t like you, but the, the best experience for them and for you is to just allow them to have access into it, into who you are and to not have to pretend and not, I’d have to fake and not have to try and cheat. RV: (08:15) And I think Mike wasn’t trying to steal attention from the camera. He was just being himself and. RV: (08:22) said, which I really love. He’s like, I wasn’t trying to win a game. I wasn’t ready to win a game. And I think that is really insightful too for a lot of reality TV. It’s like, yeah, maybe some people are getting on there too. Get married and fall in love. But I think we all know that somewhat unlikely in many cases, but he wasn’t trying to win a game. He was just like, man, I’m just on there to see where the journey takes me. I wasn’t trying to get on there too to when I was trying to get on there to follow the journey. And I thought that too was really interesting. And then just his in general. But I also think what is really fascinating about this too is how one thing can completely catapult you into another thing. And he went from being a financial advisor, a very successful one, which people probably don’t know about to being on the bachelor and then the bachelor in paradise to now he’s getting ready to do all different types of things that I don’t think we’re able to share, but really cool and amazing things because of that. AJV: (09:23) So it’s, it’s that leverage and that platform that it gives you. And you can get a platform in a lot of different ways and clearly being on TV and reality TV is definitely going to help you increase that platform, which could help you do X, Y, and Z. So what are you doing to build your platform? It just happened to be that reality TV. Was his, his catapult vision RV: (09:48) [Inaudible] certainly a word catapult data pulls you in. That’s definitely a word. I like it. Well, and I, yeah, reach, I mean there’s that reach and I would say it’s easy to kind of judge people, right? And go, Oh, reality TV or Hey, you just want to be famous or whatever. But look, reputation formula, this is textbook brand builders one-on-one reputation is relation is your rep. Your results times your reach equals your reputation. So reach is a huge part of this. Like if you want to change the world, like you got to know, people got to know about you. You got to do something to increase your reach. You don’t have to go on the bachelor or the bachelorette like, but you, you, you could you just, but you, you do need to be mindful of reach. You can’t, you can’t be, I think in one part of your brain going, Oh, you know, you’re a fame monger and that’s bad. And then the other part of your brain going, who I, I want to reach more people and be successful. Until you reconcile that, like you’re going to sell self-sabotage because you’re not really believing in just going, it’s not about fame. It’s not about any of that stuff. It’s just about reach and making a difference in getting in front of more people. So I thought it was a really sweet interview. He’s a sweet guy, very lovable. Not, not at all, you know, fake or anything. He’s just really awesome. AJV: (11:11) Really down to earth. Check it out. You’ll like it. AJV: (11:14) You don’t get a chance to hear from the bachelor and then a bachelor in paradise on any other day. All right. Thanks for being here. Have a great one. We’ll catch you next time.

Ep 70: Putting the ‘Real’ Back into Reality TV with Mike Johnson

RV: (00:06) Hey brand builder, Rory Vaden here. Thank you so much for tuning in to listen to this interview. We are so excited to bring you this information and wanted to let you know that Hey, there’s no sales pitch coming from anything that we do with. This is all our value add to you and the community. However, if you are somebody who is looking for specific strategies on how to build and monetize your personal brand, we would love to talk to you and we offer a free call to everyone that’s interested in getting to know us and is willing to give us a chance to get to know them and share a little bit about what we do. So if you’re interested in taking us up on a free strategy call, you can do that at brand builders, group.com/summit call brand builders, group.com/summit call. Hope to talk to you soon on with the show. RV: (01:03) Well, if you’re like me, reality TV is a little bit of a black box. You wonder sometimes how does it work and what does it take to be on the show. And, and you know what goes on behind the scenes and we’re so excited to introduce to you a friend of ours, a new friend of ours, one of our brand Mueller’s group clients, Mike Johnson, who you may recognize from the 2019 the 15th season of the bachelorette and also bachelor in paradise. He is super popular on the show. America’s sweetheart with the big smile, which you may not know about Mike, is that he is a former air force vet, he has a sister who’s in the service, has been to 30 countries and is really building out his personal brand in a variety of different ways. One of the things that we’ve had lots of chats with him is about this direction he’s working on related to intimacy and self love and relationships. And so we’ve been working on some of that, but we thought it would be fun for you to hear from a real life reality TV star about how the heck it happened and, and what does it mean and what does it take. So anyways, Mike, welcome to the show. Thank you guys for having me. It’s so weird when someone says a reality TV star. RV: (02:19) Yeah, I remember I was at that event with you for Elizabeth from our team and it was like, man, we couldn’t even have a conversation as fan girls fanning on you like crazy. And I’m just sitting there like, don’t mind me. I’m, I’m just here to carry Mike’s bags. I’m here to, to fold his socks and, and do whatever he needs. AJV: (02:40) How so? We want to like help everyone get to know you a little bit pre reality TV. So what, what on God’s green earth, possessed you from going from the air force to this financial world that you were living in? You were on this fast tracked career path going, you know what? I think I’m gonna be a reality TV star. I think I’m going to put myself on the bachelor. How does that happen? MJ: (03:08) Well, you know, they say success is never a straight line. It’s a bunch of squiggly lines all over the place. Right. That’s definitely the truth with me as well. Never did I ever think in a million years. I would be on reality TV. Never care to do it, quite honestly. And that’s no disrespect to the ones that do care to do that. Mmm. I just had some pretty good friends in my life that thought I would be a good candidate for it. And they, one lady, she said I would be the bachelor one day, even before I even watched the show. And then a friend of mine after me bloviating to him about how much I wanted to be in a relationship and get married after him laughing. He said, Hey, you should try out for this show. And I was off work one day and well, it’s like, why not? RV: (03:53) So, so, so what, so what happened? Did you see an ad? Did you go Google it or like, like what, what does that mean? Like how do you try out for the show even? MJ: (04:03) It’s like well some of my castmates from Hannah Brown season of the bachelorette, they were handpicked, you know, they live in like certain Chicago, LA, New York, Miami, taboo areas, me down here in San Antonio. We don’t get those opportunities. But they’re still blessings all around it. The way I did it was a friend of mine, he just DMD me on Facebook, a casting call link. Then I was off work. And so that’s the only reason I did it. And as a financial advisor, I got to wear a suit cause I’m, you want me to have mindset? Hey wears a suit and no one else was in a suit that day. AJV: (04:44) Stuck out, MJ: (04:45) Stuck out. I even got on the news that day. It was kind of funny. RV: (04:48) So you went to a live in person casting call and you’re standing in line with what, a hundred couple hundred people MJ: (04:55) About? I’ll say about probably eight to 1000 people. Whoa. I would say 10% were guys. So I could have found out like that day to be off. And I was just myself. I had how to win friends and influence people. I have that book of me cause I thought it would be a really long line. So I was just reading my book in my suit and making people laugh and being joking and talking to people, making people smile. They liked me. I don’t know how I’d be a, I was so comfortable. It was, it’s kinda when I tell people how comfortable I was and just being authentically myself and just not caring, but just being myself. That really resonated with the casting directors after that. And so I did altogether, it was probably seven months of interviews, personal interviews, to been flying me to LA to me going down to Dallas, which is a big hub for, that’s the hub for Texas. You know, the phone calls, background checks, everything. It was like I have a top secret security clearance. It was like that all over again. AJV: (06:11) Just making sure you weren’t a stalker. MJ: (06:13) Very true. Very true. Not a stalker. AJV: (06:16) Well that’s crazy. So then you get on the show. So what do people need to know about what it’s really like on the show? MJ: (06:26) Well, long hours. Oh gosh. Such long hours. People would think so. I think it’s a, it’s like a hundred hours of filming for an episode. Wow. Two hour, a 90 minute episode with commercials. Right. So there’s so much filming. You’re up all hours of the night. And so for those that watched it, again, I was pretty authentic. I mean, I was wearing my doo rag on this show because I felt that if we weren’t reality TV, it should be reality. There was no need for me to, AJV: (06:59) Hmm, MJ: (07:00) Look perfect for the camera. I felt that nothing, that’s why the audience resonated with me so much because I was just who I am. The same person, whether it’s on TV or not. MJ: (07:10) Okay. My mom heard me curse for the first time. That wasn’t, sorry mom. Sorry about that. Sorry. I was definitely a embarrassed about that at first. But then the beautiful thing about the show is that it helps break you out of that shell from, for me, I don’t want to speak to no one else. I have subgroups of friends and like I have my extremely professional group. I have my extremely my day one friends that may not be as successful as I am now. And I’ve in the past acted different towards each group. They’re still a part of who I am. But when you’re on TV, you’re gonna, they’re going to see all of who you are authentically. Right. And people that have had a bad experience on TV or a good experience on TV, I think it boils down to that person hasn’t been able to see themselves fully. And so when you’re on reality TV and they’re doing so many, so much filming and so many different scenarios, they produce your way, produce your way. Your natural reaction is how you are truthfully. AJV: (08:16) Okay. MJ: (08:16) Right. And so when people say they didn’t have a good experience, I think that they just haven’t seen themselves before in different situations. AJV: (08:23) Do you think it’s hard to be authentic on reality TV? MJ: (08:28) I think when you realize and understand that people like you more for being yourself because what you’re actually doing is helping them grow. I think once you’ve realized that, it becomes quite honestly easy. I literally forgot cameras were around me. AJV: (08:48) How is that even possible? Yeah, MJ: (08:50) I know, right? It’s like I’m kissing a girl right here on my couch and there’s like 20 right there, fill me guys that I just forgot there was cameras. I was just, one of my goals for this decade is to be in the moment, no be present. Focusing exactly on what’s happening right then and there and that’s what I did on the show. And by doing those things, you, you embrace it so much more, you feel it so much more. And that’s, that’s my advice for how to forget that there’s cameras around. RV: (09:18) So how do you balance the, like I’m, I’m trying to win a show with, I’m also trying to be myself and like, you know, this need to, you know, kind of edit your behavior too to make good TV or whatever. Like how do you reconcile all that or do you really just not pay attention to it and just do what you would do if nobody was there? MJ: (09:39) Good question, Rory. I honestly feel that I had an advantage because I never really watched this show. And so I was not scared at all. And to me it wasn’t about winning. This is a show about love. And I took it as we’re dating each other seriously. You know, and let’s say that I don’t want to use AJ for example, but let’s say there was a young lady that we found each other attractive. I’m not sure. Speaker 5: (10:05) Yeah, don’t use AJ positive tape. You’re outta here outta here. Vaden, out of here. MJ: (10:17) So not if there was a young lady that I found attractive, just because we find each other drag, it doesn’t mean that we’re compatible. And just because she’s in a position of power, it doesn’t mean that I don’t have a say so on who my heart desires. Right. And so that’s how it took the show. It wasn’t about winning. He was all about finding a connection. And I think that’s what propelled me to being one of America’s sweethearts from that season. RV: (10:44) And you think you can find real love on a, on a, you know, manufactured show in a manufactured environment with, you know, handpicked people. MJ: (10:53) I think it’s hard. But I think dating in 2020 is hard in and of itself. I think that, well, I know for a fact I’ve met a few of the couples that are now married from the show and I’ve spoken to others that are, are married from the show as well. I’ve been married for years and so I think one of the biggest things when it comes to being on a show that’s about love is having the real conversations. Like, okay, you live in Kentucky, I live in Texas. How are we going to make this one right? Or you’re a dentist and you have a very successful career in Kentucky. I’m a financial advisor and LA, no, what are we going to do? And it’s comes to having effective communication and learning how to compromise. You know, when it comes to, when it comes to love, it’s the same thing to me as being out in the real world. The only difference would be I get to see who you kiss. That’s not me. When if I was dating a in the real world, she may go on dates with other individuals. AJV: (11:56) I just don’t have to see that. And that is such a good parallel that I have honestly never thought about until this moment and a confession. I have never watched the bachelor or the bachelorette, so I’m kind of a novice in this world and so when all these people were fan girling you, I was like, I guess it’s that popular show I all my friends are like, are you kidding me? It’s so popular. But like the way that you just described that as like match.com E harmony, Bumble, Tinder all got together, had a baby and then put it on reality TV. And it really is the reality of how baiting is today in terms of, yeah, I’m going to check out all these people profiles. I’m going to see what they’re like. I’m going to look at their picture, I’m going to chat them up, I’m going to meet with them. I’m going to meet with 20 of them. I’m going to narrow it down to the three I like the most and I’m going to do it on all these different sites. I was gonna say, the only difference is that producers are the ones putting the collection together, curses the whole app. It’s a really interesting parallel that I’ve never thought about before. RV: (13:01) The other thing that’s hitting me too is like you go, well reality TV isn’t real. Those are totally fake. But you go, well no, that is exactly how it is in real life. You’re all fake. Like you all pretend on your first date, you all put on a show, you all put on a performance and it’s really like, I think that’s going to be such a beautiful part of your story is as, as we build out, like can see your personal brand unfold of like, that’s what intimacy is all about is getting beyond the camera, getting beyond the fakeness, beyond the pretense. Pretend and just AJV: (13:36) being you’re awesome self RV: (13:36) Being a real connection. Yeah. AJV: (13:38) Okay. So all right, so I know everyone who watches the bachelor, other than me apparently, already knows who you are. So what has it been like after the show? So what have been some of the, the huge benefits of how this is propelled your notoriety and your online influence? I mean, you’ve got a huge social following. You’re doing all this cool stuff, you’ve got all these brand deals. So clearly there’s been some good, even though you didn’t in front of your mother, cussed in front of your mom. Well I would imagine she’s also probably never seen you make out with girls before. But I would imagine that is equal to the benefits. There’s plenty of pitfalls. Yeah, absolutely. Tell us about that post show. What’s it been like? MJ: (14:29) Post show is crazy because you have, you know, if you, if people like you, whether they like you for whatever reason, good or bad and they like you and they follow you on your social platforms. You now art influence area and AJV: (14:47) Yeah, MJ: (14:47) But that’s what it is. And so I have everyone from RV: (14:51) Middle-Schoolers to MJ: (14:53) Senior citizens following me on my social platforms. And one of the pitfalls is that I think lady Gaga said it best and she said it’s so succinct. Fame is fame could be perceived as prison because for example, we’re in self quarantined time right now. This is real world real time right now. And I had some friends less than 10 cause that’s in Texas. That’s the rule at my home. I was helping a small local businessman and we were doing all the proper precautions. But I had people saying a bunch of negative things towards me saying that I’m not being safe, I’m not quarantining, I’m being such a bad example. And I wanted to say one, I have less than two people, 10 people in my home, don’t you think I care about my safety? And then too, people always will have something to say no matter what the case is. MJ: (15:44) No people told me to not get more tattoos and I should no get tattoo removal. But I’m being praised and I’m an inc magazine, the only bachelor to ever be an inc magazine. And so I look at it as being authentically true to you. It’s just amazing. I can connect with them people on such a deeper level. People, the beautiful thing of being on reality TV is that whether you did good or bad, people resonate with you more and people appreciate you for being you. People are appreciating me for telling my struggle. My ex and I had a miscarriage. People appreciate it. Hey, the male side of that, right? People appreciate the fact that I will say exactly how I feel and not care and people appreciate. The bad side of that is that certain people feel that I should watch my words, certain people feel that I should, should not do certain things. MJ: (16:45) But then if I fall to that, I’m not being authentic to myself no longer. And so for the longest time post show, it’s been about trying to have a balancing act, right? What I’ve learned and what my mom has always told me and what our moms have always told all of us, it’s just, you know, be yourself just to be yourself. And I think that’s the most beautiful thing that is, I’ve already known, but it’s truly hit home post show. Cause I, at the end of the day, I’m a beautiful human being and I can’t help everyone, but those that I can help, I want to help them even more. So I think that’s what it is. AJV: (17:20) So it’s interesting because yeah, I remember as a kid, my mom’s saying, be yourself and I’m sure you’re, I mean I tell my sons that it’s like, I want you to be yourself and we’ve got this little mantra right now. My oldest just turned three and he’s into this word weird. And so every day I help him say, I weird, I weird, weird daddy. Mommy, you’re weird. I’m like, yeah, weird. So it’s like got this mantra, I weird. But I would love to know like what’s one tip that you would say like how do you be you like how do you be yourself, RV: (17:58) particularly when you have the [inaudible] yeah, like because you have the pressure of a camera and you have the pressure of the world watching. Like when you’re most, you’re most incentivized to do something that’s not you to be like a polished version of yourself. Like even post show, just people are now watching because they’re watching you, they’re following on social media. AJV: (18:19) How do you do it? MJ: (18:21) I think it’s even bigger post show because during the show you can’t see the comments, right? Post shows. When you see the comments, that’s when people respond to you. And I think to answer your question it’s like one of my models or it’s not my model. I’ve stolen, I mean it’s been said hundreds of times before, but the thing that gives you the most butterflies do that. And so what has always given me the butterflies post show was just, I used to get so nervous and try to Polish myself and I would get so many butterflies, but the way an antidote to those butterflies, it’s just again, embracing your uniqueness and knowing that you’re not going to be able to make every single individual fall in love with you. But the individuals that do fall in love with you are true fans of yours because of how authentic you are. MJ: (19:12) It’s just like a dating. I can’t make a hundred girls like me, but for the 20 that like me, for me, those 20 will really, really ride with me and that’s what most important is. And I can pick a one out of that 20 because if I like the rock, he’s the most famous person on all social media, not just to include Instagram, but Facebook, all different forms. He curses, he’s really big in the gym. He is, he focuses on embracing the pain, being authentic. And so I think that to be succinct when we can be introspective and do exactly what we feel, but of course being a good human being, that’s how you win. That’s how you connect with people and that’s how you can propel your career. Whether you’re like me, a reality TV star or like my former self, a financial advisor or someone that is a wife or husband. MJ: (20:09) Like yesterday, for example, I did an IgE lie and one of my insecurities as I’m growing aging man at 32 years old, my hairline is starting to go back and a lot of my fans are 21 right? And so I’m thinking, man, there I’m competing with like a 22 year old guy, 21 year old guy. Well, in all actuality, my fans like me because the strength that I have and so I make fun of it. The my, my love language in one way is just to laugh, right? And smile. And so I was, I went like this on camera. I said, Hey, does anyone know about some, some medicine that I can use or some nutrients I can use to help me with my, my insecurity of losing my hairline. Right? And someone said Biosyn. And so I think that’s what makes people resonate with you so much more. AJV: (20:57) Okay. No, I think that’s, that’s so good. And it’s so true to this whole concept of building your personal brand. RV: (21:05) Yeah. And the intimacy in the honor, I think just the honesty with yourself. I mean, if you’re building any personal brand, you know, being honest about who you are and what you’re truly passionate about, people see that and they are attracted to it or they see you being fake and they’re repelled from it. So. Mmm. Well, one last question before we let you go though. Mike, where should people go if they want to connect with you and kind of follow your journey and then kind of see what’s, what, see what’s going to happen from here. MJ: (21:33) Absolutely. Mike Johnson, one underscore that’s going to be on Twitter, on Instagram, on Facebook. I dunno how people find me, but just Mike Johnson, I don’t know how they find it. And my johnson.com is coming soon. What domain you’re, you AJV: (21:52) We can’t wait to continue to watch you on your brand journey. We have some insider info on all of the amazing stuff that’s in store for you. We’re not going to share your secrets. Everyone’s going to have to stay tuned. Follow Mike, stay in touch with us and we’ll see you again on the influential personal brand podcast. MJ: (22:11) Awesome. Awesome. Last time, last words, I would just say, make sure we all keep our mental health up and make each other laugh during these quarantine times.

Ep 69: Getting to Grips with the Fundamentals of SEO with Rick Steele | Recap Episode

RV: (00:08) well, um, that was amazing. Uh, that interview with Rick Steele, I’m telling you like that is, could be seen as more valuable than like an entire degree or program that you could, you could invest tens of thousands of dollars into and, and listen, right? Like when it comes to learning, uh, how to do it. RV: (00:36) Paid advertising, I’m going to go with the guy who spent $94 million, $94 million in Google paid ads, right? Like amazing. And he’s turned it into billions with a B, multiple companies doing billions of dollars. There’s something to be learned there. And it’s one of the things I have to S you know, I love about brand builders is it’s just when you come to our events, you know, whether they’re the virtual events or there are physical events, you know, our events are small. Like our events are capped at 50 people and most of them are like 25 30 people. And you’re literally sitting next to somebody like Rick Steele who is spend $94 million in ads, ran seven marathons in seven days, is built all these huge companies, you’re sitting next to these podcasters that reach millions of people or people have million social media followers. Like our community just fires me up. RV: (01:35) And so I hope you enjoyed and if you didn’t like go listen to this interview with Rick steel. He’s not like, he doesn’t teach what, like his personal brand is not about the stuff I was interviewing him. He did that as a favor to me cause he’s one of our clients and our friends [inaudible] okay. Him giving away his secrets about how to run, uh, paid ads through Google is just insane. So I’m going to give you the recap here. Um, AAJ wasn’t able to make it today. So I’m rolling so low of course this, this is this, this concept or this topic was square in the center of all things nerdy. And so it’s probably a proposed that I’m doing this recap by myself cause I just love this stuff and I want to try to simplify it and try to organize it for myself and mostly for you know, for you and for my, mostly for myself really just to like make sure I’m understanding things. RV: (02:33) That’s why we do these recaps and learn alongside of you. But here’s the first big idea I think from that interview is that intent based search. It is a huge part of the future for personal brands and that’s a big difference is understanding intent based search, which is Google. Somebody comes and they type in a term like nobody tight. When you go to Google and you type in broken water heater, you’re not typing it in just to learn about water heaters like you’re typing it in because you need that thing at that moment. And that’s the power of intent based search is it is somebody saying I need this thing at this moment versus traditional advertising. Even Facebook is more of awareness advertising. It’s, it’s, yeah. Inserting yourself in front of somebody and saying, Hey, check out this thing that I have, you should be interested. RV: (03:27) So you’re, it’s the difference between creating interest and, uh, drafting off of interest, right? Capitalizing on existing interest in which is what intent-based search is all about. And I, I want to make sure you caught what he said because he’s built huge companies and he said in the interview he said, I only have these two rules. They said, make sure there’s a big enough market for you to make a Denton. So there’s gotta be enough volume that you don’t have to be the only option that, that, that there’s room for you plus competitors. That’s really smart, right? Like it’s to go, there’s a, there’s a big enough market here that you can have at least a few, you know, really, really key players and as long as you’re one of the key players, like you can make a lot of money. So that was interesting to hear him say that. RV: (04:18) And then he said the second rules that don’t create a product that you’re going to be in competition with Amazon, which I thought was interesting. That’s more for you e-commerce people. Um, you know, selling, selling physical goods. But Mmm. You know, for personal brands, most of, most of you, most of us are selling video courses, membership sites, coaching programs, consulting, speaking, you know, like you’re selling, you’re selling more of a, a service or or knowledge, you know, information. And so I think it’s, it’s, you know, that’s a handy advantage that you have that you’re not really competing with Amazon. So, um, anyways, that was super powerful. The other kind of tip in this, in this space cause cause here’s the, you know, here’s the big idea I think in general. And, and, and by the way, so our phase three event, we have an entire event that is called high traffic strategies and it is a hundred percent dedicated to this kind of stuff. RV: (05:14) Now it’s all, it’s, we consider it more advanced because unless you have gone through phase one and captivating content and phase two and you have your funnels built and your visual identity done and your website and all of your copy is in place and all of your tracking, right? Like there’s all of these things that you need to do to build the house first. But then when you come to phase three like, um, this is where we really light it up and, and it’s doing this kind of stuff and, and you know, like the big idea here, it’s very straightforward. It’s in phase two, we’re going to teach you how to build organic traffic, right? It’s all about, you know, we teach this thing called the content diamond and there’s a 50 plus page document that we walk you through step by step, exactly what to do every single week with your social media plan and your email marketing. RV: (06:01) And it’s all organic. It’s all free organic traffic, but you’re building an audience. The difference here in phase three, which is the big idea is going find an existing audience and that the people that you want to do business with, they’re already aggregated somewhere. You just got to go find them. And that’s what the power of Google and intent based search platforms do is like literally someone is typing in a term at a specific and moment in time when they need a problem solved. And if you know what that problem is and you own and dominate that term and you’re willing to pay for it, you can force the traffic because these people already exist out there. And so I think this is something that I think personal brands are way behind on. I think, you know, personal brands in general, like there’s a lot of people doing Facebook ads. RV: (06:52) There’s not a lot of people doing YouTube and [inaudible] the Google ad network, right? Which is really Google and YouTube. Um, a lot of, a lot of you of that do personal brands, you know, like we’re using Facebook and Instagram, which is fine. That’s great. You know, that serves a PR that works too, can work. Um, and, but it’s, you know, it’s totally different. They’re two different universes. The other thing with the YouTube thing, which is, you know, as a handy little tip, if you didn’t pick this up from what he was saying was that in YouTube you don’t even get charged for the ad if somebody skips it. But you know, like if they watch less than five seconds, you don’t even get charged for the ad. So that’s like a free impression, a free show of like, yeah, you got, you got five seconds to do a free five second ad or say your name, your company name, and boom, like I get that impression out there that is super powerful. RV: (07:49) Like free advertising on the biggest ad network in the world. Mmm. Pretty incredible. So intent-based search I think is, is a big future for personal brands. We dive into it completely at our phase three event and it’s just decide all based upon the premise of that your audience has already collected, they’re already aggregated in many places. So while you’re building your own audience, go be in front of the existing audience. And that’s really important. The second thing that is more of a concept, I just want to make sure y’all understand is this concept of re retargeting and it’s important that you get this right because you know I didn’t really understand it and it it’s, it’s something you can hear and not recognize the power of of what it is. And what it means is that, you know, when somebody comes to your website, you’re probably familiar with the concept of lead capture and that’s something we teach in phase two is build a lead magnet. RV: (08:49) Yeah. Which is offer something of value for free in exchange for lead capture. You’re going to capture somebody’s name, typically their name and email at first, but what about the person who comes to your site and either you don’t have a lead capture setup or you know, they come to your site somehow they’re on there, they found their way there from something, but they don’t ever, they never fill out the lead capture. Right. They never contact you. They never say they want more information, but some they’re interested it somehow, some way they ended up there. Well that’s what retargeting does. It’s basically taking this person who would otherwise be invisible. You would have no way to track them. And it’s, it’s almost like you put a beacon on them and, and now it’s like a digital beacon that you can see wherever that person goes throughout the web and you can re target them, you can show them additional ads to try to drive them back to your website for specific products or specific offers. RV: (09:53) That is huge. That, I mean that is insanely powerful is to go imagine if in the real world you can know everyone who ever had a thought about, Hmm, your, your company or your product or service. And you could literally know everyone who had ever had that thought and then you could show an ad just to those people. That’s like what retargeting does. I mean it’s extremely powerful and they never have to give you their email. They never have to give you their phone number. All they do is show up on your site and that is how you get that. And so you know, there’s some technicality parts of that that we cover at the event in terms of how to set them up. But you know, your web person can set it up and Google, Google and YouTube and then Facebook and Instagram, you know those go together. RV: (10:38) They’ll give you what’s called the pixel, which is what you need. It’s a piece of code that you install on your site. LinkedIn also has one. So you know, if we’re managing your brand or or somebody else’s managing your brand, you just need to tell your web person like, I need you to install my Facebook pixel pixel or my Google pixel on my site and you’ll immediately start tracking that stuff. That’s part of what we do in phase two. We don’t teach people about pixels and retargeting, but we do. We do tell them you need to, you need to just do this. Like just, just listen to us and do this. We’ll teach you why later. It’s kind of wax on, wax off type of thing. But you gotta be retargeting, like at least be showing ads to people who are already saying they’re interested in what you do by virtue of them coming to your sites and to your registration pages for your funnels and to your sales pages for your products. RV: (11:30) Mmm, really, really important. And then the third big idea here I think is just optimization, optimization. You know, when he was telling this the, the, his story about, uh, you know, how, how he started his company and, and you know, they’ve done a couple, they were in the mortgage space and now they’re, now they’re in, um, you know, they’re doing blinds. But yeah, I think w when he talking about this idea of the very first ad they ran was for pho blinds and he was saying like, you start with 50 bucks and you just, you put $50 into it and you see what happens and you, you, you measure and you watch to see, do, do people click on the ad and then if they click on their ad, do they come to your site? And you can run different ads. And so even somebody who’s spending $94 million in ads, it’s starting with the $50 ad spend. RV: (12:26) Right. You know, you, you probably go, I don’t have $94 million. Well I don’t either. But you know, you could probably scrape together 50 bucks or a hundred bucks and get some data, get some testing and these tools that he mentioned, uh, I had heard of the first, I had not actually heard of the second, which I’m excited about. So these are some nerdy tools for, you know, either your digital marketing team or your tech person or you. And we’re certainly going to be, you know, getting into the details of these and introducing them to our, our team and our community when we get to phase three, um, is heat mapping. Okay. So that’s a crazy egg was the tool. There’s some other ones, but crazy egg is the one that I’ve always heard of. So heat mapping shows you, it’s, it’s kind of like, you know, when you see an ad for like an acid or Mmm, yeah, somebody is sick and they have, they show like a FA, a figure of a human body. RV: (13:20) And then there’s like flashing red where the pain is like, Ooh, heartburn. Um, that’s like what heat mapping is. It’s just, it shows your website and then it shows these flashing red areas of where people are hovering with their mouse. Right? So that’s one of the things people do is they wherever they usually point with their mouse, the mouse to where they’re reading. Okay. Or to, you know, clearly to what they’re going to click on. And so you can follow the journey that a new visitor coming to your site for the first time who doesn’t know who you are or an experienced person. Just anyone come into your site and, and you can go, you know, is my copy effective? You know, are my, are my lead magnets working? You know, are these buttons effective? And you can see like what are they passing over and what are they spending time looking at? RV: (14:13) And what are they clicking on because of the heat map. Tell you again, without even knowing who the people are, you don’t even have to have their email. It’s just the people who come to your site is tracking it. And then this is the new one, which is awesome. And this is next level. Uh, um, he said the company or the tools called full story, which I had never heard of. So I’m, I’m, I’m jacked about this full story, which is a video experience. So not just heat mapping, which kind of shows like these are the hotspots that people go to, but full story literally records the entire journey of someone on your site. So where do they down and where do they stop and, and, and how does their mouse move across the page. I mean, that is huge. Like what an unfair advantage of the digital world. RV: (15:01) And this is where it’s like, if you’re not doing this stuff, you’re, you’re, you’re behind. And if you’re not doing this stuff in five years, you’re, you’re out of business, right? Like, like right now, if you’re not doing it, you’re just behind. But if you’re not doing this in five years, you’re out of business. But here’s the problem. You don’t, you don’t start with this stuff. This is domino number 76 you got to lay the first 70 Domino’s in the right order, which is what phase one and phase two is all about. And you got to get busy and I got to get busy, right? Like I freak out here some of this stuff cause I’m like, man, somebody is going to figure this out. They’re going to come crush. They’re going to come dominate. So if you’re not doing it right now, you’re just behind. RV: (15:44) But if you’re not doing this in a couple of years, you’re out of business. So this is a big deal y’all like this is, this is happening, it’s been happening and we need to get on board and, and you perhaps need to get on board or your team needs to get on board. We need to up the sophistication here because we’re competing with people who do this, right? You’re, your website isn’t just competing with other people who do what you do. You’re competing with Amazon, you’re competing with Rick steel, you’re competing with Ninja level digital marketers and cutting edge tools and intelligence and data and tracking. And it’s like if you’re not doing any of that, it’s time to pick up your game. You better get going. Um, because there’s only probably a little window here of, you know, a couple of years where you can establish yourself as the authority in your space. RV: (16:35) And then after that it’s going to be hard to come and dethrone the King. I mean, think about if you were launching a store right now that was like, okay, home Depot and if you were going to try to build a brand and to go, you know what, I have an idea for a hardware store and you would be competing against Lowe’s and home Depot and ACE hardware and true value and, and, and Menards and then, yeah, and be like, yeah, I’m going to start a new one. Think of how hard that would be to dethrone these huge national brands with millions and millions of dollars. It would be difficult to do it. It’s not that it couldn’t be done, but it would be difficult. There would have to be something very disruptive. Well, that’s how it’s going to be in the personal branding space. RV: (17:23) I think in five years there’s going to be people who own the verticals. They’re already are right there already are these giants in the space, like, you know, you already have Tony Robbins than you, you’ve got Mmm. Yeah. You know, like Rachel Hall is, you’ve got Mel Robbins, you’ve, you’ve got Brendon Burchard, you have Marie Forleo, you’ve got, uh, you know, Lewis house. So some of our clients have these huge spaces that they own and, and there’s a little gold rush going on, right? And if you’re not in the game, you’re in trouble. Like, you gotta get going now, like move this is, this is it, you’re, you’re living in a time where you have an opportunity to change the world with your message, but there’s a closing window of, of how much opportunity there is there. And, and you know, talking to somebody like Rick in this interview just makes me go, Holy moly. Like I, I’m, I need to pick up my game and I consider myself, you know, towards the leading edge of, of, of thinkers and leaders and teachers and people in this space. But knowing that Rick steel’s out there, whew. Like it’s a new level and it’s a new day, but also massive, massive opportunity. So it’s exciting and it’s fun. And I’m so glad you’re here because you’re learning it now and you’re not learning it before it’s too late. So thank you for being here and we’ll catch you next time on the influential personal brand.

Ep 68: Getting to Grips with the Fundamentals of SEO with Rick Steele

RV: (00:00) Okay. So you are about to meet one of the, the world’s most interesting men. Okay. So Rick Steele I want to let you know upfront, he’s a little bit different from the kind of people that we would normally have on this who are sort of like personal brand experts. You know, they’ve built a personal brand. Here’s what Rick has done. He’s the founder of multiple, multiple billion with a B billion dollar businesses. He’s a celebrated philanthropist. He’s a bestselling author, but he’s really an ambassador of effective altruist. So he has been twice featured on the inc 500, not 5,000, inc 500 list. He was named humanitarian of the year by Harvard business school. He’s been listed among fast company’s, most innovative companies and he has been helping growth minded entrepreneurs create more social impact. And that whole movement has gotten him featured in the Washington post, Forbes entrepreneur, ESPN HuffPo and Fox news. RV: (01:05) And right now he is kind of, you know, he is, he is the founder of select blinds, which we will talk about. That is like his current main business that he is, is operating. And but you know, like he, he really is organizing a movement of high net worth business leaders to bring them together to solve immediate humanitarian and environmental concerns by not only lending their talents, but contributing a significant part of their estate to kind of nonprofit causes. So he is sitting in his garage right now, his, his car dirt with his car collection. And if you’re watching this on video, he also has his gym upstairs. And that is because he has also a 13 time iron man. And the reason we are what we’re talking about on this, cause he’s done a lot, but we’re going to be talking about paid traffic acquisition, search engine optimization, pay-per-click strategies, which is what he, he’s also one of our brand builders group clients. RV: (02:06) And so we’ve had the opportunity to get to know him and he has this ridiculous level of expertise that nobody has. And we’re going to talk about that. But he also just completed in his spare time something that he called the world marathon challenge. He did not kidding. Listen to this. Seven marathons in seven consecutive days in on seven different continents, seven marathons in seven consecutive days on seven continents. And when we started working with him yeah, he was actually one of our private clients. He came to Vaden Villa. He worked with us at the house and he was planning this. And I was like, bro, this seems like a little bit of a logistical challenge, like even, and so we haven’t really talked, so I need to hear just like for a minute, how in the hell did you do seven marathons on seven continents in seven days? That’s insane. RS: (03:07) Well, you, you know, you first have a really really good travel person and the guy that put this together for us, a guy by the name of Richard Donovan done this a few times for small groups. I think you can only do it with a small group because it was chaos, you know, getting, you know, we still had to go through security and had to go through customs at every continent and, you know, make planes and all that stuff. But you know, it, it, it’s a logistical nightmare. Yes. But it’s a, the idea of, you know, picking up and training in the training for it was, was really, I think, harder than the marathons itself. Once we got on, you know, you’re thrust into this group of, there was 35 of us, you’re thrusting this group of people that like 34 of your friends now are not going to let you not do this. RS: (03:54) Right. So you are doing this. And the first one is, Aaron has got a big smile on their face and by the third or fourth, you know, everybody has blisters and shaping and hurting somewhere and you know, so you, but you have, you know, you can go far by yourself. You know, you’ve heard this before, but you can go a lot further with the team. And you know, we had a team of people we didn’t know the minute before we met him and it was a brotherhood, sisterhood. I mean, it was, it was amazing. A group of people that just helped everybody get through this thing. We started in Cape town, we went to Antarctica, almost died in Antarctica. I mean, we literally were in a hundred mile an hour winds in Antarctica. We got delayed there and it came back and went to Australia, Dubai, Madrid for, to Liza Brazil and in Miami where we were met by all of our family members friends or a few hundred people there. It was just, it was amazing, RV: (04:47) Man, bro. Like, we’re going to have to do a separate podcast for, for my, like our leadership podcast of just the mindset and the mentality of training for that, because that is just, well, congratulations like ed to the whole crew. I mean, you’re also depending that nobody in the 35 gets seriously injured and sick and you know, like, RS: (05:10) Yeah, that it was incredible. You know, Kobe had just started in China and in fact there were six members that couldn’t make the trip because they were flying from Beijing and all the flights have been shut down. So they couldn’t participate in it because we had, you know, this was just the beginning. You know, time where the world started shutting down and really China shut down at this point. When we got back, we were about two weeks away from, you know, what we’re going through now, which is kind of a U S shutdown starting in Washington. And you know, it was I believe it was just incredible that we were able to pull it off. It was just the timing of doing it. You know, had we been a few weeks later, it wouldn’t have happened, which would have been okay too. You know, we live in a different world today, so we just have to and get used to what’s happening. RV: (05:59) Yeah. Well I think that gives good backdrop for people a little bit, just kind of about your mindset and your mentality. Mmm. You’re also a nine figure entrepreneur. You’ve built companies that do over a hundred million dollars in revenue a year. Mmm. And you know, there’s just so many amazing things that you have done that has been inspired me. But you and I started geeking out about some stuff and I was like, wow, Rick really knows this stuff. So can you just tell everybody a little bit about select blinds specifically and what you do and how you and your team, I know you have an amazing team. How have you guys built it and kind of what makes select blinds different, you know, from like most blind shops, so to speak. RS: (06:51) Yeah. You know, w we started blinds in Oh three, you know, before that I was doing mortgage, how had an internet mortgage company that we exited and blinds was a, you know, I didn’t want to create something so new, I had to go create an audience for it. So the idea of going into blinds was what can we sell differentiate ourselves a little bit from the market. But w you, you know, basically sell online in a marketplace that already has traffic. The traffic’s there, there’s already intent based buyers typing searches in. All we have to do is find a better way and sell them a better product. And it was easy for us to do back in 2003, you know, this whole I was reading an article the other day, talked about, you know, Warby Parker, you know, kind of pioneered this space of DTC in 2010 and I was like, wait a minute. No, no, me and my buddies, we were all doing this in 2003 it but it’s a RV: (07:48) In DTC, just clarify DTC, RS: (07:51) See direct to consumer, meaning that you are selling only your brand, right? And you are sending it right to the consumer. There’s no store, there’s no middleman, there’s no wholesale. It is drop ship right from you to the consumer. Which allows you to have an intimate relationship conversation, narrative with the customer. It’s so hard to do when you add one component in there. When you start adding that component in, now you’re forcing a sales person, distributor, somebody to share your message with the consumer. So DTC just means I have a direct line right to the customer. They get to know exactly what I’m about. So we had done that mortgage. We’d had that relationship. So we, we didn’t, you know, we weren’t no Nostradamus Domus or anything, but we did kind of see that there was some silly stuff going on in mortgage. RS: (08:37) Pretty much everybody could get approved for a loan. We decided to say, listen, let’s insulate ourselves from, you know, we didn’t know anything about mortgage backed securities or what was going to happen, but we just knew that the fact that home values continue to go up, everybody could get approved for a loan that wasn’t right. So we wanted to insulate ourselves, our team, our company from that impending crash. So the idea was what could we sell? Like what is something we can do that’s fundamentally different than taking a lead online and that was sell a product. And if we sell a product direct to consumer, we can have a little bit more of the control. So that was 2003 we started that thing in our bedroom. And you know, really started building the site, not knowing exactly what products we were going to sell and not knowing all the details about how we were going to sell it but just with enough passion to go out and figure it out over the course of like the next 30 days. RV: (09:28) And this is, this is select blinds that you’re talking about. So, but, but in some ways this is insane. Like you chose blinds to sell on the internet. Like there couldn’t be a more necessary like come into your home, measure it and if anyone’s ever installed blinds, like it’s a, there’s a lot to it. It’s not the, the, the simplest process and there’s lots of different tastes and styles. But to me the, the probably the first major lesson that you’ve already shared here is you went and saw intent-based traffic. Like you made a decision, a business decision based upon there is an existing audience who is looking for something and rather than, rather than starting and saying, I have something and I want to sell it, you said, what is there a market for? How do you do, like how would you do that today? Or like how does somebody determine that, what, what the, the appetite is or what intent there is out there in the market? RS: (10:39) I mean, it’s real simple in Google ad words. I mean, you can go set up a Google ad words account, put no money on it and Google gives you a keyword tool that lets you basically go in and in any region S only worldwide, you know, somewhere in between start inputting keywords. And for instance, if I wanted to start a blinds company today, I would go tell Google, show me how many people are Googling the word blinds. And Google will show me how many words how many keywords there are, what the cost per click would be if I were in the number one position. But then also start recommending a lot of other words that are also pretty accurate. You know, this wasn’t the case five years ago, but today, but man, they have nailed it with the AI. I mean, they know what I’m bidding on, they know what my competitors are bidding on. RS: (11:22) So therefore when somebody new comes in and says, Hey, show me blinds, they can pretty much tell you what the bucket of keywords are to about 99% accuracy from there. You know, really, you just, you gotta become a mathematician, you gotta start working the numbers. You’ve got to start making some assumptions on what the average order value would be. You know, you can get pretty close to that. What’s your expected click through rate would be and what your conversion rate would be. And when you can figure those things out, you can very quickly come up with, it’s a little bit of a guesstimate, but you can come up with what your average cost per order would be to actually close the sale, close an order. So much of that though gets refined when you get into the battle. A lot of it is just, it’s inspiration enough to know. RS: (12:07) For me it would be to say, listen, there’s a market here, and I don’t know exactly how big, but I know it’s a big market. It’s a mantra market. There’s a million words a month for the word blinds. I’m just making stuff up here. There’s a million intentions every month. Somebody type in the word blinds in, I’m going to go figure this out. And then it’s just get on the battlefield and figure it out. Right. Start taking people’s guns, start figuring out where to fire, you know, start figuring out where you need to hide. When your competitors have launched missile attacks at you start, you know, when those missiles miss and you know, they don’t blow up, you go pick one up and keep it for yourself. I mean, it is truly a battle that you have to figure out. But you know, for me, I’ve got so many friends in this in this space where they go out and create audiences like on Facebook and they create new demand for them. RV: (12:59) Yes. And I want to talk about that. Like, can you, can you, can you delineate here like what is the biggest difference between Facebook ads and let’s just say Google. I mean, you really, it’s, it’s really Facebook and Instagram and then it’s really Google and YouTube. So what’s the, what is the thing that separates those two categories? RS: (13:21) I think when somebody comes to Google, they have said inherently when they’re searching for a product, and that’s what we’ll, we’ll, we’ll relate this to when they’re searching for a product. They are saying, I am ready to buy for product based. You know, sometimes that is, I’m ready to just do some window shopping and research, but most of the times it’s, I’m ready to buy on Facebook as an example with running ad campaigns and setting demographics, you know, not talking about retargeting, but in Facebook it’s more I’m going to go put an advertisement in front of somebody that is likely to buy this product. They’re not right now in the market for blinds, but you know, I know them to be a homeowner. They just bought a new home. You know, there’s a lot of different, you know, kind of triggers I can put in Facebook ads that would say get me in front of an audience that is ripe for, for new blinds. Google is these people type the word blinds in. I mean it is somebody literally just walked through the threshold of a store and stood there and said, you know, I’m here to buy. Sure, put me in the right direction. RV: (14:23) Nobody is searching blinds for fun. They are searching, RS: (14:27) They don’t want to see pictures of blinds. Right. I mean say there’s a small small piece that would, you know, be looking for some inspiration because I think they can do it themselves or whatever it is. But dying, you know somebody types in guns and roses t-shirt like their, their intent right now is to buy a guns and roses T shirt right now. RV: (14:47) And that is what we so so the phrase you dropped it in earlier and I don’t think is aware of it would be intent based search. Right. And that’s kind of the, that’s kind of the technical term is they’re typing in something because they are hot, ready to buy or ready to look. You know, they’re seriously interested. And that is the power of what happens with Google. What would you call it on Facebook? Is that just like an awareness campaign? Is that like, is there a term you would use for the, that kind of, RS: (15:18) It would be awareness. I mean we, we run the retargeting and we run retargeting campaigns on Facebook, meaning somebody, RV: (15:24) So hold on on retargeting, let’s talk, let’s, I don’t want to get, I don’t want to get everybody lost on the retargeting just yet. But, but not counting retargeting. Facebook is just like, it’s just kind of like a general marketing campaign. Like if it’s like just kind of a broadcast campaign of awareness, the difference is that you’re able to really narrow down the who versus just buying a billboard on the interstate. You’re able to say, I’m going to show it to certain types of people. RS: (15:54) Correct. And, and, and even with a billboard on the interstate, there’s, there’s some targeting, right? Cause you’re choosing where you want to put your ad on what, but Facebook is a is a is it, it’s a, an exploded view of that. So let’s, you be very specific about who you want that ad to go in front of. I don’t, I have friends have such success with this. I don’t know how they get it to work. It feels like so much effort to me. I’d rather I’d rather work backwards and say, you know, put me where there’s a bunch of intent, a bunch of people looking to buy a bunch of things already saying it and then let me figure out the product. Let me figure out how to improve the experience, improve the product and and be a better company for the customers that on that landscape today. RV: (16:41) And I think, and that’s one of the reasons why I wanted to have you on is because I think that the personal brand influencer market has just, you know, completely crushed Facebook ads. And it’s not that they don’t work, they do work, but I think that the intent based search for the most part in the personal brand world, nobody is doing it. And they, they, they, they don’t know how, and they don’t understand it because they don’t, people use Facebook as a user. The average person has never used ad words or done keyword research. And I think there’s a huge frontier here, particularly with Google and YouTube that I think personal brands are sort of missing, missing the boat on. So so you’ve got intent-based search happening. I want to back up a little bit. You threw out some terms about the, the average order value you threw out, like click through rate, cost per order. These are important terms that somebody, somebody needs to understand. So how do you, how do you make a prediction, like RS: (17:50) You’re saying effectively you look for, there’s a lot of demand here and then you’re going to use these kind of key terms to go, how do I make a prediction, an estimated guess of what I think I could, how I could turn that search into money and how much it would be worth it to me. So can you kind of like slow walk us through that, that, that thinking, let’s use, let’s use like the guns and roses t-shirt as an example of that. Let me do some simple math, right? So let’s say it’s a $50, and this is a, this will be a millennial hipster guns and roses t-shirt, right? Probably the guy wearing it doesn’t even know who guns and roses is, right? RS: (18:30) I love giving millennials shit. But they, so it’s a $50 t-shirt. It’s a Mmm. And you understand that you can buy that t-shirt for 25 bucks. So I own the tee shirt for 25. I’m selling it for 50. I’ve got 25 bucks in margin. That’s what I’m going to make, right? And we’re going to start talking about shipping or I’m going to make $25. So now I get to go to Google and say, how many people are typing in guns and roses t-shirts? They’re going to give me a number. And that number comes with a couple of figures. They’re going to say 300,000 people per month. Type this term in, in the average number one position is a dollar 40, which means you would need to spend a dollar 40 to get someone to your site. If you wanted to own the first spot in Google, Google estimates this, but it’s pretty close. RS: (19:17) You would pay less if you want to own the second, third, fourth spot, right? So let’s talk about the number one spot. I want to own it and it costs me a dollar 40 so when I get somebody to the site at a dollar 40 I’ve got two I estimate some conversion rate. I’ve got to be able to know that I have to close. Well, let’s see if I close 5% that’s one in 20 that would cost me $28 it would cost me, so for 20 clicks it would cost me $28 that’s 5% closing, right? Okay. So you’re saying a dollar 40 a click dollar 40 a click, 20 clicks are going to cost me $28 now I need to close more than one per 20 clicks. Right? 5% to get that as those numbers to work out just mathematically based on what the, you know what the profit margin is on the tee shirt I’m selling. RS: (20:09) So let’s let’s say 10 let’s say 10% and that’s, that’s a high conversion rate, but it’s not unheard of with really good skew based products that are quick to buy. You can get in and out of the cart quickly. So let’s say 10% conversion rate at a dollar 40 meaning that it costs me $14 to get 10 people to the site. Once I had the 10 people, there are one person purchased, so I made $25 so my costs per click was was $14 for the 10 people. One person purchased, I made 25 bucks, my profit margin was $9 right on my $50 products. Let me just make sure I got it. So there’s a, RV: (20:47) There is a $50 t-shirt sale, you got $25 wrapped up in your cost of goods to buy the tee shirt that or make the tee shirt that you’re selling to the person and then you just paid an additional $14 to get 10 clicks on that term of which one of those people bought. So you got, you’ve got $25 in the cost of the shirt, $14 in the advertising cost to get the customer and so that leaves you a net profit on a $50 sale of nine bucks. RS: (21:19) Sure. And then you’ve got some fixed costs, you know, your rent, your employees. Like of course you know you have all that stuff you have to fig, you have to factor in. And that’s why it’s good to just kind of get a spreadsheet out and start factoring this in. These numbers start becoming pretty easy to figure out if you’ve got a big enough market to go after. So if I, if I went to, if I typed in Joe Jones yet, right? Let’s say I only wanted to sell Joan Jett merchandise, well I need to first understand is there a market, like is there a big enough market for me to start my own Joan jet website? Right. Very quickly. If I go to Google and Google tells me there are 580 searches every month for Joan Jett t-shirts, I can pretty quickly say that’s not a big enough market for me to start a company on this, but let me look at starting a rock concert t-shirt or you know, picking the top 20 whatever RV: (22:07) Broaden. So basically like if there’s not enough search volume on it on a narrow term, you’d have to broaden it in order to accomplish the same thing. RS: (22:15) Correct. You know, I have two rules. You got to make sure there’s a big enough market and understand that there’s a big enough market for you to make a dent in where you can you can have success whether there’s competition or not. Meaning that if there’s six or seven competitors, you’re just going to make each other better. It’s gotta to be big enough that you can have that success. The second thing I think is just as important, maybe more important, but it’s definitely just as important is you cannot be a product that you’re competing with if you just can’t compete with Amazon. Like, if you are trying to sell something that Amazon is shipping to customers in 20 of their warehouses, same day, good luck. I mean, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s almost impossible. I don’t like to tell people you can’t do that or it’s impossible because I don’t believe really anything’s impossible. But RV: (23:06) You also have been kind of the guy who ran seven marathons in seven, seven days. You have to know what you’re up to, RS: (23:11) Right? So it would, you know, it would be silly to go out and try to build a model on competing, and I’ve done this before. We own mean we own a company called betting.com we sold sheets, comforters, blankets. We owned the number one domain name in that space. So how could it not work? I mean, how could we not crush it? And we failed because we started selling products that we were drop shipping. We own an inventory, but we were drop shipping from the vendors and they were getting there. You know, we would have to tell people three to five days, sometimes seven days shipping in Amazon. Zappos, a lot of our competitors have these products in stock. They were shipping same day. Amazon had some of the products they were shipping two hour delivery. So it’s like, how do you compete with that? So you’ve got to, you know, you gotta know what you’re up against and you also got to no, that if you are on a level playing field on shipping, how do you differentiate yourself? How do you make, how do you create a better product RV: (24:07) Now? And, and, and this is part of what I wanted. And just for those of you listening, like most of our audience is not in true e-commerce where it is products and logistics and drop shipping and vendors. Most of our, most of our product base you know, personal brands are selling informational type of products, membership sites, video courses, these things that don’t have the costs. But [inaudible] you need to apply the same type of rigor and thinking it’s all the same concepts that would apply here is to still go figure out what are people searching for. What is there a market for that I’m well suited to serve? I mean, would you agree with that? The same rigor could apply here RS: (24:50) A hundred percent and I think also, you know, when I, when I saw your company out Rory, I didn’t Google Rory Vaden, I Googled a term, I’m trying to remember what it would have been, but I’m pretty sure I was searching for the number one, like who would I work with when I want to work with, with my personal brand that’s going to crush it for me, that’s going to help me crush it. So my search term was probably, you know personal branding, a mastermind or something, right. There was some search, and I don’t know if you know, I found you guys via a paid ad, but I would say what you can do, no matter what you’re selling, even if it’s just informational and you’re using Facebook ads, you know, what is w what are the physical products that you that somebody could search on Google that are somewhat relevant to what you’re also selling in your informational business coaching, whatever it may be that are relatable to, you know, to, to that product. Because then if you can buy those clicks and you can sell a product cheap, you know, that’s a, that’s an easy and cheap way to list build too, right? So you can then sell them a product you make a little money on. Maybe it’s a loss leader. RV: (25:58) Well, that’s what a lot of people do with the book. That’s what the free plus, the free plus shipping model is with the book. But you know, so here’s what’s interesting. We are number one for the term personal branding, but it’s not our website. It was, I was interviewed on social media examiner, which is a monster website, but they did an interview with me and that it, the interview did so well. Plus their audience is so big in general and there’s such a high authority site that when you search personal branding, at least at the time of this interview that comes up. And so I think that’s probably what happened. Cause I know you found like you, you listen to that podcast with Michael Stelzner and then, and then we meet you. But, but okay. Yeah. So, so, so basically you’re going to make a prediction here, right? RV: (26:48) You’re going to, you’re going to have some forecast, you’re gonna throw out some numbers. You’re going to look at go, where’s the demand? How much is it going to cost for the click? That’s a good tidbit. I didn’t realize that the number that Google publishes is the number is the number one position for the click. So what about, so at that point then, basically you just start putting some money into the machine. You’re driving people to a website and you start monitoring how many people visit that page versus how many buy is that basically it, RS: (27:20) Yes. I mean you, you know, you want to make sure you’re setting yourself up for success and having, you know, when somebody lands the page has got to be good, right? You got a good product that’s got an easy way to check out. You know, I’ll equate this to, you know, our first product, full wood blinds there, which are fake wood, you know, they’re like a poly blind. We had this product live the very first day we turned it on to pay-per-click. I mean we probably put 50 bucks in there or something. And we said at an immature, it was like a dollar per click that at that time, you know, bring people to this page for full wood blinds. And we just, we watched it, you know, we sat there, this is before Google analytics, but Google and there was a, there was a competing product before Google analytics where we’ve been watching the traffic. We would see what they were doing. W how much time and RV: (28:11) Okay, so, so what, let me just make sure, so you’re saying that when you first started that it was like a page for pho blinds and you just basically threw 50 bucks in there to sort of test it. Like is that basically what you were doing was to watch to see what happened? RS: (28:26) Sure. You know, we said let’s put 50 bucks on and that’ll give us 50 people to the site. Let’s see if anybody buys. And if somebody does, it’s going to be amazing. We’re all going to jump up and down and cheers that we actually have something that will, you know, that works. And they did. We actually sold to a couple of customers, I’ll never forget it because it was a it was this moment where it was just like this. We knew it was going to work, but we didn’t, we didn’t know conversion rates. We didn’t know, you know, how much it was going to take. We didn’t know what we would need to adjust pricing to be, you know, because you know, you, you could only, you know, if we sold one out of 50 people and that’s a 2% conversion rate. If we sell two out of 50 people, it’s a 4% conversion rate. So we’re able to make better economics at 4% conversion rate of course. But a lot of it was just, you know, today the capabilities are just, I mean, I can’t even imagine having these capabilities 15 year, 18 years ago, whatever it’s been in looking at Google analytics and watching customers come to a page, see how they interact. How long do they stay? What buttons are they clicking, where are they hung up? I mean, you can physically see their mouse scrolls and you can see, you know, kind of RV: (29:36) Google analytics show you hate map. Does it show you heat mapping? RS: (29:40) They don’t. They’re, they’re heat mapping tools RV: (29:42) That you can add in, which is, which we have in and there’s several of them out there right now, like crazy egg. And we use a company called FullStory. Fullstory. Just watch, let’s you literally watch via like a video recording session, the customer’s journey. So you can see like if they’re on their phone, they’re scrolling, pinching and zooming where they pick up on something. It’s so you can really understand their interactions beyond a click or beyond a patient. Wow. That is incredible. I’ve never heard of that RS: (30:14) In this. I liken this to if, if you were a store, like best buy and you had a bunch of people come through the front door and then a lot of people go to, let’s say the TV aisle and then everybody just stood there and looked at this one TV but then walked away and didn’t buy. You would want to know specifically what’s wrong with this one TV and why they didn’t buy. So you can start asking questions. You could start, you know, really looking at that page and saying, what’s wrong with this? And almost always you will find an error on the page. You’ll, it’s priced too high. It’s like, you know, you’re saying something that doesn’t really give them the information they need. So, you know, these tools are truly just unfair competition to like traditional retail. I mean traditional retail really, unless we live in, in like this minority report world where you see where Tom cruise walks in and they start, you know, doing the eyeball tracking and identifying stuff. We are like dozens of years away from that. This is the world we get to live in, in e-commerce when using tools like Google analytics and crazy egg and full story to see a customer’s intentions and behaviors. RV: (31:20) Wow. So, so then basically, I mean, at a high level you’re going to do a little research to figure out what is their intent for. Then you’re going to look at some numbers, you’re going to make some hypotheses about how much it’s going to cost. Then you’re going to build a page and you know, a product and you’re going to put a little money into the machine and then you’re going to watch how it performs. And then after that, it’s basically just this perpetual tweaking and updating and optimizing. I guess would be would be the word. And and then is that, is that more or less what it is just and it’s just that over and over again. RS: (31:57) It is. I mean, and then in one day, you know, you find yourself spending a hundred thousand dollars a day on Google and managing tens of thousands of keywords and you know a lot of time a lot of growth. But that’s it’s, it’s exactly what it is. I mean it is, you know, the direct to consumer brand with millions of customers. Like we are had to start with a couple of people in one sale and then you know, evolve to a dozen sales and then hundreds of sales. RV: (32:22) Can you share how much you’ve spent on Google or like give us like any sort of idea of like how like just how much has your, have you spent on like pumped money into the app? The Google ad machine, me and my, RS: (32:34) Me and my Google, I spoke, I spoke at Google about this a couple of years ago and it’s funny, they asked me to talk about, you know, why we, how we have such good conversion rates and what are we doing? Like what is the thing that gets us to, to move the needle. And I kind of put a joke on my PowerPoint, which was the formula. It’s a three step formula. Formula one is I give Google my credit card, step two is Google charges my credit card. And then step three is I find a way to make all that work as a marker. But my rep and I, every now and then we will w well I will do a screenshot on the account and I think the last time we screenshotted it between our two accounts were just under a hundred million. Right now, $9 million in spend. RS: (33:13) Yeah, $94 million. $4 million. But it is, I mean, every single dollar has been worth it because they have all, you know, it has all been intent-based traffic. I mean, so it is a, I mean, it feels unfair, but I mean, this is where, when you look at Google, I mean these, this multiple, almost trillion dollar company gets almost all of its revenue, right? So just let that sink in for a second. All of its revenue from pay-per-click ads and those pay-per-click ads are dominantly intent-based. You know, customers, I’m looking for this right now. Sell this to me. So it is a you know, it doesn’t have to be blind. I mean, it could be duct tape, it could be a variant of a new product that’s out there. You know, Shopify, some of these platforms give you the ability to spin up a site and have tools that are really even greater than what we architect with. RS: (34:14) I’m so much greater than what, how, what we built in the early days from day one for like 30 bucks a month. It’s, it’s truly insane. The platforms that are out there and that’ll let you spin up a, a really good eCommerce platform. And so does this also, is everything that we’re talking about with Google, does this also apply to YouTube? It does. You know, we do, we do some advertising on YouTube with video ads that are both intent based video ads and then also, you know, retargeting video ads as well. So we have a, a couple of really good high production videos we’ve done that are commercial quality where somebody, when they come into our site, they leave. I mean the best use of YouTube is, is a being there in a retargeting narrative that shares a little different message than what you were sharing on the front end. RS: (35:04) So, you know, if somebody came to your site and they left and didn’t buy your, your ads probably didn’t work. I mean, that’s kind of what the assumption should be is my ad was wrong. So I need to deliver a different narrative, different story on the on the back end. And so it’s the retargeting on YouTube. We get the opportunity to do that in those, you know, if you’ve seen the ads that are, you know, they make you play for five seconds and then skip. Yep. There’s, there’s ways to gain that. Just make sure you get verbally your name and audibly audible, your name and digitally your name in the first five seconds so they hear your brand’s name and, and see your logo in the first five seconds. And if somebody does skip, you actually get that brand impression for free because Google doesn’t charge you for it. So and a lot of people skip, a lot of people get through these and it is, again, it feels like cheating the system, but it’s, it’s best practices with what we get to do. And I’m delivering an impression to somebody that’s not watching the full 32nd ad. RV: (36:00) Yeah. And you’re saying you only pay if they watch more than five seconds? RS: (36:04) Yeah, I think we, we start paying, there’s some level that we start paying at. But, and they don’t have to watch the whole video, but if they skip at the five second Mark, we don’t pay. RV: (36:14) Yeah. And so then you’re literally telling people about what you do for free. Like the Google machine is pushing you out there. RS: (36:24) I mean the first five seconds of our ads has select blinds verbally in it. I mean our logos in the bottom right of the screen, it is you, you will have known what that commercial was about if you skip it. RV: (36:36) Yeah. Well I mean this is so fun. Like we didn’t even get into retargeting like there’s so much here. And it just for everyone to know transparently, I, when I was polishing up our, we have our, you know, we have our, our nine different events. When I was working on our phase three high traffic strategies event, I called Rick because I was like, Hey, I want to bounce a couple ideas off you, make sure I got this right. Like and it’s just, you know, like you were someone that I tapped personally to go help me try to get my mind wrapped around this. And it’s in some ways it’s really complex, but mostly it’s very logical. It’s very systematic. I do have one more question for you, but before that, where, where should people go? You know, Rick, if, if they, if they want to, they want to connect with you and follow you. RV: (37:27) I know your, your personal brand and just so everyone knows, like Rick is not in the business of teaching people this, his personal brand is really about effective altruism. He’s, he’s really driven by making a dent in the world in a positive way. And you know, building a, a network of you know, more or less high net worth individuals who, who have a real desire for humanitarian and environmental concern and help. So if you’re one of those people, I’m sure he’d love to connect with you, but just in general, people want to like follow up and know who you are. Like, where would you direct them? RS: (38:02) Yeah, I would say, you know, best channel is Instagram and that’s a Rick Steele official on Instagram. You know, you’re going to see you know, a brand there that if you hold my Instagram up to select blinds, you’re going to say, wow, this guy’s crushing it and blinds. Where’s this guy going with this personal brand? What’s a personal brand? Right, exactly. I feel, you know, the game of building a personal brand. That’s why we need really great leaders like you and helping us out with this because this is, for me, it feels very hard. I mean, it feels very hard. The, the game of e-commerce direct to consumer, it feels easy, right? Maybe it’s because I’ve been doing that longer and I’ve been immersed in that game for some time, but yeah, Rick still official will be the place to go see, you know, just a guy that I think is, you know, I’m living a hard charging life, trying to be a good dad, good husband, good business guy and and good athlete all at the same time. RV: (38:58) Yeah. And you’ve got a very entertaining, you’ve got tens of thousands of followers, a hundred, hundred over a hundred thousand followers. So you got, you got some good stuff going. And you’re just like, yeah. And like most interesting man in the world, maybe it’s the most interesting man in the digital world. Like it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s pretty incredible. So here’s our last little question for you. Where do you think the future is going as it relates to paid traffic acquisition into and intent based search? RS: (39:32) Listen, if you would have asked me four weeks ago, I would’ve, I would’ve given you the same answer, but with maybe a little bit less enthusiasm. You know, I feel very lucky to be in this game of direct to consumer where somebody orders online. Listen, I don’t know about you Rory, but I’m doing stuff around my house now that I didn’t think I would ever do. Like again, maybe which is, you know, landscaping my entire house. Not that I’m bored, but I just like, you know, I’ve got some extra time. I’m doing some stuff around the house. I would say if you’ve thought about building a DTC direct to consumer e-commerce, this is the time is now, you know, this, this Corona virus coven 19 has, I believe is going to leave a generational Dennis and, and I think it’s gonna be positive. RS: (40:21) I do, but I believe that we are going to be more grateful when we do get to spend time with people that is going to be more quality time. But I also believe on the flip side of that, people are going to be doing more of their own stuff, buying and securing, procuring their things. We’ve already seen this as an immediate pop in direct to consumer and just online search in general across everything. I’ve got friends in different, you know, spaces online. All their searches are up. I think people, this, this has given people the ability to have a little bit of empowerment and say, Hey, maybe this is something I can do myself now and, or, or by myself and have shipped to me. So, yeah, I don’t, you know, I’m a, I’m a small business too, so I still, for me, I want to support small business as much as possible, but I also believe that we’re living in we’re going to come out of this with a little bit different behavioral change then when we came into it with, and a lot of that is do I need to walk into a store? RS: (41:21) Do I need to have a sales person in my home? I mean, there’s just a, it’s a, it’s a real interesting time we’re living in now. So I think the you know, with enthusiasm for me and, and the type of business that ran, love it, but it’s still yet to be seen. I believe the behavioral changes is going to be here to last. I don’t believe this is a, you know, something that we forget very soon. So, RV: (41:44) Yeah. Well, RS: (41:45) If we ever get out of quarantine, if we ever get, I’m in my garage right now. I mean, this is where I’m doing all my stuff is in my garage, so, but I like it. RV: (41:55) I love it. I love it. Well doing business from home, it’s it’s, it’s I think it’s a trend that, you know, clearly was a trend that was happening. I think this has accelerated it. It’s only accelerated it. And given that that’s the case, the insight and the wisdom and the experience that you have just so generously shared with us is, is truly priceless. I think that understanding these basic concepts can literally be worth millions of dollars. They have been to us just understanding intent based search and you know, where is demand and getting in front of it and hypothesizing with some basic ratios and then testing and optimizing like this is, it’s, it’s interesting to see at your scale that, that that’s how you get there. It’s this, it’s the same process. So brother just thank you so much and we wish you the best. I know, you know, some, some of us will get a chance to meet you at one of our brand builders group events in person when we resume our in person events, maybe virtually for the time being. So all the best man. RS: (43:02) Yeah. Thank you. Really appreciate it. Thanks.