RV: (00:01) Hey, it is the Influential Personal Brand Podcast recap, edition three and three, me and my wife and CEO of Brand Builders Group. AJ Vaden here to bicker and and discuss and go back and forth and share with you our top three highlights from our long time and good friend Bill Cates. So babe, why don’t you kick us off? AJV: (00:22) Yeah, I think the most interesting and I’m kind of like taking us all the way to the end and then we’ll kind of skip around. But this was just really, really fascinating to me. And this is all kind of in coordination with this book that he has which I think is just this whole concept of neuroscience. He has this whole chapter about it in his book and Radical Relevance is the book. And he said this is what he says. He said, your brain is literally looking six times a second for safety, like every single second. Your brain like that’s from anything from your biochemistry to just breathing, walking not tripping, not falling, not getting hurt to actual emotional, physical, mental, RV: (01:07) Which you notice when you have a three year old because it’s like, Oh, you never realize how much danger there is just everywhere AJV: (01:14) Everything is Danger. But six times a second your brain is looking okay for how to stay safe. And three times a second your brain is looking for an opportunity and what does that have to do with what we do in marketing and branding and building a personal brand. And I think this was the part that was like really tied it all in together and made it so interesting is you go, what do people really look for? And it’s like so many times we just go out and we market the solution and we forget to identify what’s the real problem. Like how are we helping people stay safe, be safe, feel safe. RV: (01:53) Like they literally scientifically will pay more attention to you can talk about the problem. Yeah. And how to stay safe AJV: (02:00) In addition to the opportunity. But it’s twice as more when you are trying to keep them safe, solve a problem protect them. Provide security versus just talking about what you can do. And I think that’s just really relevant. Yeah. To everything that we do. And that’s just natural brain chemistry. RV: (02:21) Fortunately or unfortunately, I think this is why I think the media knows this very, very well, right? Like they have taken it to the level of what Andy Stanley uses the term fear peddling, which I thought was a really good term. And you know, so it’s, it’s sort of a delicate balance, but any you, you want to be clear on what is that problem an and I think the, one of the things that jumped out for me or like a thought that I had as a result of what bill was saying cause the neuroscience thing was one of my top three takeaways as well. My second big takeaway was just that clear is greater than clever. RV: (02:58) Clear is greater than clever. It’s like people need to understand, it needs to be so painfully obvious, like ridiculously evident. Unmistakably clear exactly who you’re helping and what you’re helping them with. And that is this. You just can’t hear that message enough. And it’s amazing to me how almost every single interview we do with someone who has built a major personal brand, this comes up in the conversation. RV: (03:33) A key thing. So clear is greater than clever. AJV: (03:36) Yeah, kind of to that point, he even talks about when people go to your website and you know, it’s like you gotta be thinking about when you build your website, one of two things. First, who is this for? Right? Who is your, what we call your ideal avatar, your perfect avatar. He calls it the right fit clients. But who is this built for? And then what value are you providing to them? And he said, and it cannot be for everyone because it is the more general, the more confusing, the more general, the more overwhelming. And I think that too is kind of in line with what you said. Okay. So onto my second one. Mine was an analogy and I’ll probably use this for the rest of my life and maybe eventually take credit for it. AJV: (04:20) But at the very, very, very, very end of the interview, he just stayed, he said he got this from one of his mentors and this analogy of a water hose. He said, when you turn on a water hose, there is intense focus, all this water being streamlined into this tiny little tube and then it goes out and it can have a lot of velocity and make you know, a lot of distance and cover a lot of grounds, no pun intended. But what would happen if you took a needle and he started poking holes and this water hose and is that an eventually you’re going to start having all these little, you know what would you call them? Off sheets. Spickets spouse. There you go. Spouts. You’d have all these little spouts throughout the water hose. And the focused water at the end would start to dilute and get weaker and would it have as much power? AJV: (05:14) And he said the exact same thing happens with our message. If we don’t have focus, he goes, the more you try to do, the more diluted everything becomes. And that happens with your audience, with your message, with your marketing, with your services, with your offerings, with your copy. He goes, if you’re trying to serve everyone, you are serving no one. And he said in the more distractions that come your way are all these little holes in the water hose and you got to patch those things up and get everything streamlined into one concentrated effort. And I thought that was a really great visual. Yeah. I’m too be like, yes, that’s true. It’s like why am I getting distracted and all of this stuff RV: (05:57) All of the time. How do I refocus and get back on the one singular path? Yeah, I love it. So for my third thing, it’s kind of the same thing we’ve been talking about, but it’s from the other side. So one of the this was probably my favorite takeaway from this interview was that, you know, when we talk about having focus, which I mean that’s our, basically the entire conversation at our phase one event is how to find your one thing and to w, you know, we walk you through our [inaudible], our brand DNA helix. Those of you that have been through it, you’ve been through that process of reconciling all of these different questions we asked you to, to help you identify what is the thing you should focus on. But the way when we talk about focus and even as we’re talking about it now with our first ones, it’s always like, you should do this to create more differentiation. RV: (06:45) You should do this so that you have like your resources in mind in one direction. But the thing that he said, which I think is super important to realize is that when you do this, you serve your audience deeper. Like you serve your audience better. So it’s not only just about separating yourself from the noise in the marketing or being clear about who, who you serve. Those things are super important. But additionally, when you narrow your niche, when you narrow the audience, it allows you to actually spend the time exploring and diving deeper. And I think about brand builders group is one of the things that we made a strategic decision early on. W only gonna do personal brands. We get asked all the time about can you lead a strategy meeting for the company? It’s like, no, that’s it. It’s not that. What we do doesn’t apply to that. RV: (07:38) It’s that it takes us off course. And we, yeah, actually just to kind of like pinpoint on that, I love why are friends, Susie Moore says, because she says, I get asked, why don’t you have this and why don’t you have that? Why don’t you start a coaching program? Why don’t you do a live event? She goes, I’ve got a really good answer to that. I don’t want to, yeah, some degree. We made a conscious decision like, we don’t want to do company branding. We, you don’t want to. Well, and we just, we understand personal brands, our whole world, all of our friends, I mean it’s just like the world that we live in. And so, but the, to what he was saying is it’s not just like a business strategy, it’s also a service like a customer service strategy. Yeah. And I don’t think we think about it. RV: (08:20) I think we all think of it as like, okay, the marketing strategy is to focus, but also realizing this is a customer service strategy. And that was just a, that was a refreshing take on, you know, a fundamental concept of what we teach. And yeah, what we talked about. My last one is really short. It’s really simple and it’s kind of, I think the first thing he said on the interview, he says, relevance is influence, boom. And that was just like, I mean, that hit me like square on of like throw  [inaudible] very feminine, masculine, masculine, Mike drop. AJV: (08:59) But just relevance is influence. And you know, and the times of today with all of this craziness going on, doesn’t matter like where you are and what’s going on. You have to be relevant to have influence. You can’t be teaching and peddling something that worked 20 years ago and expect to have relevance and thus influence today RV: (09:19) All the time. Literally teaching the same exact technique that they taught in the 1985 AJV: (09:29) Doesn’t work. It doesn’t. Relevance is influence. RV: (09:32) There you have it. Friends, top three and three influential personal brand podcasts from your favorite Nashville couple with red hair and a dark hair who work on personal brands exclusively at brand builders group. We love you. Be relevant. Have a great one. We’ll catch you next time. Bye bye.