Ep. 35 Why You’re Building a Personal Brand – Whether You Like It Or Not

Why You’re Building a Personal Brand – Whether You Like It Or Not

Whether you like it or not, as a business owner, you are building a personal brand. It’s time to stop fighting it and start building your personal brand – on purpose.

Torie Mathis and her cohost Sean talk about their personal brand journey and how every business owner can leverage the power of their personal brand to grow their business.

Learn how to harness this marketing strategy to build your business.

We’ll cover:
The transition to a personal brand
How different industries can utilize their personal brand
Benefits of a personal brand
The danger of defaulting your online persona
What exactly is a brand?
Why YOU need a personal brand…yes YOU!
Steps to start your personal brand
How to clean up your online presence

Mentioned on this episode:
Crush It by Gary Vaynerchuk https://amzn.to/3l9ru3M
Crushing It by Gary Vaynerchuk https://amzn.to/2HB3GrZ
Miles Through Time: https://milesthroughtime.com

Get SMART AF resources and tools to grow your business at besmartaf.com

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION –

(transcription is auto-generated)

SAF 35

[00:00:00] Torie: I am a personal brand, whether I like it or not, whether I fight it or not.

Hey, welcome to Smart AF I’m your host, Torie Mathis. We’ve got a great show for you today. So let’s get started when I started my business. I built, even though it was just me, my whole goal was to build like, Corporation. I wanted it to look as big as possible. So that I had clout, you know what I mean?

Like I wanted it to look like I was you know, a design firm and it’s crazy that. That was the goal back then and now so where in here, like things really switched to rather than necessarily building a company. It is more about now building your personal brand, which I fought. I fought so much. But I think building a personal brand is something that every business owner should do.

And I think almost like most people I could probably stay the case for building a personal brand as. 

[00:01:17] Sean: Especially with social media nowadays. 

[00:01:19] Torie: It’s so different than when you’re creating a brand for yourself, whether you know it or not, absolutely everything you do, anything that’s, that’s public that people can check.

I mean, literally, that is your brand. So why not actually take control of it and build your brand for how you want people to see you? Because if you go Google your name right now, If you’re a business owner, stuff probably comes up. Now you might think, well, I have no control over that, that you do.

Like if you actually put stuff out online on social media your own website, whatever you want to do to build that brand of yours, those are the things that’ll come up, have articles written about you do events like whatever it is that you can do, every single one of those things that you do starts to build your personal brand.

I think that I read crush it by Gary Vaynerchuk many, many years ago. And like, he’s put out like a lot more books since then, but that was like the first thing that really opened my eyes to the ideas. Shit. Like I am a personal brand, whether I like it or not, whether I fight it or not like there’s like so much opportunity out there to take control of what you’re doing and to create that brand that I never really even thought of.

And so now that there’s so many more opportunities both positive and I guess negatively for branding, I think it’s more important than ever for people to. To build their personal brand. And we always talk about realtors. I see so many realtors. They would come to us for marketing type materials, realtor clients over the years, a lot.

And they would brand themselves for whatever it is, the company they were working with. At the time. 

[00:03:11] Sean: So century 21, max, whatever, it was nothing other than that, that logo essentially. Right. 

[00:03:19] Torie: Right. So they would like, they’d come and they’d be like, do new cards and do this and do that. And that my website is now Keller Williams dot blah, blah, blah. And so everything would be wrapped around whatever it is, the company that they were working for, then when they would switch. And I don’t know what the heck you realtors do, but it seems like you also. They would have to take everything, throw it all away and start over at Caldwell Banker rather than building their own personal brand. And having that brand equity. 

[00:03:50] Sean: Switch out that little icon of whatever real estate office they work for that way. 

[00:03:55] Torie: They were constantly building their own equity of all this stuff, rather than just going off of whatever the company was that they’re working. And I think that whether you’re a dentist or a plumber or you make pizzas, like whatever it is, you’re doing, you have a personal brand that you can start to work on.

[00:04:19] Sean: For sure. There’s again, some of the most famous businesses are backed by a very famous. Person apple, Steve jobs, right? If there was no Steve jobs, would there be an apple? I mean, Steve jobs has had a hit that was his brand and he had a brand in the black shirt. And like you knew it was him. I mean, there’s, there’s, there’s so many even. 

I think Elon Musk is a really, he knows Tesla, but then Elan has his own brand and people know who. Ellon could throw Tesla away right now and create something else. Even if it’s a car or something and people would be like, that’s what we’re following now. Cause that’s what he learned says, I that that’s this. 

[00:05:16] Torie: And all because he stepped out and claimed that he’s the expert and built that brand of himself.

And not that I’m saying that everybody do it that far, but you never know. Like, I don’t think in the very beginning he knew he’s just a regular guy. That’s like a software guy. Right. You never know who was going to be that like really breakout person. But if you never allow that to happen, like you’re never going to be that brand name where all of you, I have the ability to be that brand name.

[00:05:48] Sean: Well, and we talked in a, in a, in a different episode about car dealers, car dealers are made up of a bunch of salespeople. You know, each one of those salespeople has an opportunity to create their own brand within that dealer. So again, whether you stay at that dealership or go to another dealership, if you’ve created a brand for yourself, You have a lot better chance to have people still contact you. Maybe you’re selling Nissans one day and you know, Mercedes, the next and your clients might be like, ah, I’ll try Mercedes. You always got me a good deal before and treated me right. 

[00:06:29] Torie: So by being a brand, like, let’s say you are a car salesman, but rather than being Ben that works at Nissan, maybe you’re Ben the car guy and you’re always going to be been in the car guy.

And so Ben, the car guy it has his website that he talks about cars on social media. Then the car guy talks about cars on, you know, wherever Ben goes. Maybe Ben writes up a little book about cars or whatever it is. He starts his own podcast. He, you know, whatever these things are writes articles. He is always going to be Ben the car guy.

If he lets himself. So by getting that following, Ben actually has created his own equity of a following that when he works at Nissan, those people might follow him over and wherever else he’s working, he might be able to build up something else and go up the levels or have a better sales position, become some type of manager, you know, because he has that following and has been building his own brand as Ben the cargo.

That’s right. So I think that even if you’re a dentist, like be the very best dentist and be, you know, the dentist guy, like steak back claim that that’s who you are. And even if you are in some place that you, you know, you’re not exactly sure if that’s what you’re doing. People will follow you and possibly move to whatever it is that you want to do.

But you have to start to put yourself out there to build that personal brand and not be afraid of staking that claim and getting a little bit of a following. Even if you don’t like you always, you don’t want to do to take the default. Like if you don’t put stuff online, there’s just going to be whatever happens to be there, which may not be the greatest stuff.

But if you take control of that, then you’re in control of what items are actually on there. So if you’re looking for a job or if you’re looking to get more clients or you’re looking to, you know, land that killer job Or a project. If people go and Google you and find out who you are and what you’ve done, and you have that branding kind of behind you, then that’s going to propel you and make you even more trustworthy.

For example, we are doing the Tesla world record and in doing this we’ve had to talk to people and Shawn has had to ask a lot of people for help on some of these. We’re asking people to give their time, to give their money. And when you’re doing that, people are probably going to Google you. And if they Google Sean like his body of work kind of speaks for him and kind of vouches for him that he’s legit.

Like if Ben, the car guy did nothing and people wanted to vouch for Ben and they know there’s nothing out there except maybe his personal profile that he’s thrown out a couple of things. You know, because people could go and look for Sean and see that, you know, oh, he is the founder of Miles Through Time. Oh, he has been on these TV shows. Oh, he has, you know, done all these other things like that, vouches for you because you built that brand around, you know, the fact that, that you’ve already done all these things. 

[00:09:32] Sean: One of the first things I do for people that I meet, I want to know who I’m talking to and all, sir. Google search him on social media. Just, just to see what pops up, you’d be amazed at some of the stuff I’ve seen popped up on some of these people that like, I don’t need to be working with them. I found some horrible things about some, some people luckily it’s totally not common. But it, and this was back a few years ago when, when, what I did for a living was a little bit more important as far as security type stuff goes.

And so I really like dove into like, who am I dealing with? And I found out all kinds of stuff that I could care less to know about people, but there it is. So, I mean, when you talk in brand, you can also say what is your expertise? Like, let people know about that stuff, because I think people can get confused on brand. Like, I don’t need a logo. You probably don’t. I mean, what is it? You do? What is it you want to do? What is it you want people to, to know about you? That’s your brand, put that stuff out.

[00:10:54] Torie: And so putting up, like, I love doing this kind of stuff for people because it gives them kind of a home base to go back to and gives them like sets this kind of rule, sets the style for them across everything. So once you kind of set this up, it makes it really easy. You know, like what Sean was talking about, you put all of these things in one place, one little simple website that says, what’d you stand for?

What you like to talk about? What you, you know, bend the car guy talks about cars, you know, whatever it is, you know, the dentist talks about, you know, his dental things or hygiene or whatever it is. Then anytime you meet anybody, you can always send them there so that they know about you or think about it.

If somebody ever Googles you for anything, what do you want them to find? Because otherwise, you know, you don’t want them to find all this random things or maybe it’s not even you. And they think it’s you. Cause I’ve looked at people and I’m like, I’m not sure if this is them or this is them like, make it so like, that is you. And that is who you are so that when people do look up for you, like they know that that is you because I think that’s important, especially in this social media. 

[00:11:57] Sean: Just at the bare minimum so that some social media profile. LinkedIn is a good one. You don’t really have to do anything on it, other than such a profile up. What, what do you want to put out there that you want people to know about? You? You don’t have to do anything else with it, but if somebody Googles your name, your profile pops up and they’re like, oh yeah, there’s their expertise. Here’s all the stuff they do. They check out whether you think it, or like people are, are, are checking. 

[00:12:32] Torie: I taught this class at the college about social media etiquette and something else. I don’t remember exactly. It’s a couple of years ago. And I was actually surprised that. I don’t know if people knew that they could go back and clean things up if they needed to.

Because if you go and Google yourself, there might be some things out there that you may want to clean up. It’s possible that you might be able to delete them, or you can always go onto your social media things and see are they public? Are they private view it as public? Like this part of like, I think of being any type of business owner or.

I don’t know. Like, I think even if you were just looking for a job, like this is something that I think you really need to do, go on your social media and do it like a simple audit. What do people see when they go on there? You can view it as somebody that doesn’t know you, or you can view it as a friend and see exactly what people can see.

If there’s stuff that shouldn’t be on there, if there’s pictures, you wouldn’t want an employer or somebody that you want, you know, to give, you know, $20,000 for some projects. Clean those up and take those off. If Ben, the car guy doesn’t want, you know, his new employer to know that when he was 16, he went to spring break and you know, like you can clean all that stuff up.

You can delete things, you can make things private. You hear about all the time people deleting tweets because when they were younger, they said things that were not very. Like, this is actually important for anybody that is out in the public eye and these days that could be any of us, even if you don’t want to, as a business owner or as somebody that I don’t know is even just looking for a job, you kind of are in the public eye a little bit, even like the kids teachers, like we signed Riley up for a coding class recently and they sent me the name of the guy that was going to be as teaching.

Copied it pasted his name into Google, found out where he went to high school, where he went to college. What he was like, I know about him now seems like a nice kid. Imagine what I would have found out. Like, you know, if that kind of stuff wasn’t clean or if you would have never, like, I dunno if he, you know, he makes sure for that, but if you’re dealing with kids, I would probably make sure whatever comes up as good and not whatever comes up is bad. Now, what would be better is if I searched his name and he had his own website. Instead, like, I love coding and like how great it is and, you know, teaching kids like that would have even made me like, want to do it even more like, so he could’ve grasped that and made himself the expert of, you know, teaching kids to code video games and things like that.

So that’s like a way that anybody could take this a little bit further and make people want to work with you even more. I think this could be for any business owner. If you do any type of service business or you’re dealing with children or you’re going into people’s homes, what can you do to build your personal brand and to make people even more comfortable that they would want to work with you?

If you’re trying to land any type of contract. People are going to Google it. Like what can you do to invoke more trust, to make people feel more comfortable with giving you money or giving you their time. And even all those things make a difference in all these things you have control over. Now, these things are easy.

Like building yourself a little website can be easy where you can have somebody do it for you. Really not you’re. 

[00:16:08] Sean: Just fill out stuff. I just stuff that’s going to pull up stuff where professionals are just, just have it so that it’s, you know, what you want people to see is what they can see and nothing else. And I, you know, we live in a day and this world where something’s going to be there. You so make it, make sure it’s what you want them to do. 

[00:16:35] Torie: And if you know, somebody is going to be Googling you, or, you know, you have something like this coming up, it would be a really good time put out a couple of YouTube videos, throw up a little site fill out your, you know, profile’s a little bit different so that you show what you’re about and you show what you want people to see so that they’re more likely to make the decision that you want them to personal branding.

Like it’s, it’s going to happen, whether you like it or not. So you might as well take control of it and have it go the direction you want.