Rory Vaden On Becoming Wealthy And Well Known Through Your Personal Brand

ABOUT RORY VADEN

Rory Vaden is the co-founder of Brand Builders Group, a firm that helps clients identify their voice, tell their story and share their unique message. He is a world-class speaker who has competed in the World Championship of Public Speaking, and he has given a TEDx Talk, How To Multiply Time, which has been viewed over 4 million times. He is also the New York Times bestselling author of three books: Take The Stairs, Procrastinate On Purpose, and a new one, Wealthy and Well-Known, that publishes the day this episode releases – and is available in audiobook for free.

Rory joined Robert Glazer on the Elevate Podcast to talk about building a successful personal brand and using that brand to build relationships, revenue and a bigger impact on the world.

Get Rory’s audiobook for free: Wealthy and Well Known by AJ and Rory Vaden

Listen to the podcast here

Rory Vaden On Becoming Wealthy And Well-Known Through Your Personal Brand

Welcome to the show. Our quote is from Jeff Bezos, “Your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room.” Our guest, Rory Vaden, is the co-founder of Brand Builders Group, a firm that helps clients identify their voice, tell their story, and share their unique message. He’s a world-class speaker who has competed in the World Championship of Public Speaking. He’s given a TEDx Talk, How to Multiply Time, which has been viewed over four million times. He’s also the New York Times bestselling author of three books, Take the Stairs, Procrastinate on Purpose, and his newest one, Wealthy and Well-Known, which publishes the day this episode releases, and that he’s going to talk to us about, and is also available to our audience in audiobook for free. Rory, welcome back to the show, and thanks for joining us for the second time.

Thanks for having me. It’s always good to be with you.

Introducing Rory Vaden

It’s been a few weeks. We were together in person, so make a habit of it here. We dug into your background a bit on your first appearance, which people should check out. It’s episode 139. You have come a long way since then. I want to start with the great story you have about how you found your first extremely valuable mentor when you were around college age. Can you share that story and the advice he gave you?

The first time I ever saw a public speaker, I was in sixth grade at Platt Middle School, which is a true story. I went to PMS. That was my middle school. We had all the hormones flying around. That was the first time that I thought, “How do you become a speaker?” When I was in college, there was a gentleman who spoke on this. I was in a direct sales company, working there in the summers to pay my way through school.

Where were you? Were you in the CatCo Mafia, too, or not?

It was not CatCo. We were selling educational kids’ books, but it was door-to-door, 14 hours a day, 80 hours a week, straight commission, and knocking on doors. We had to knock on doors to find a place to live. We took cold showers every morning. It was very intense. They brought in motivational speakers to keep us pumped up. This guy, Eric Chester, walks out on stage, and he was magnificent, hilarious, insightful, inspiring, and all the things.

He mentioned in his speech that he had a son who was a student at the University of Colorado in Boulder. That was the campus that I was recruiting on. That was my territory for recruiting students. I went up to him afterwards and I said, “Mr. Chester, one day my dream is to do what you do, but right now I need your son’s phone number because I’m going to recruit him and I want him to come with me.”

I got to know Eric a little bit, and he made a pact. He said, “If you mentor my son and make sure he doesn’t get kidnapped or something happens to him that’s terrible in this summer program, after this is all over, I will mentor you.” I did that. I worked with his son, Zach, for a couple of years. We had a great time. We lived together, and he was a great guy. When I finished graduate school, I took Eric up on his end of the bargain.

I remember we sat down the first time at our very first meeting, and Eric was like a former bodybuilder. He’s this huge, muscular man. I was raised by a single mom. I’m a pretty boy, mama’s boy over here. Eric said to me, “I know I agreed to do this, but I want you to know that I don’t like mentoring people because I don’t like working with others. I’m a lone wolf. I work best by myself. I’m only going to mentor you if you do exactly what I tell you to do.”

I said, “Sir, yes, sir, absolutely, Mr. Chester, you tell me what to do. I will do whatever you say.” He said, “The difference between a good speaker and a great speaker is 1,000 presentations. I want you to go out and deliver 1,000 presentations. That’s the first objective.” That’s what started me on my career. I spoke 304 times for free and made it to the world championship twice in my early twenties. We then built an eight-figure business.

The first company was a sales coaching company. We put on these huge events, and then my TED Talk went viral. My first book hit the New York Times. When I was 37, Mr. Chester was the one who inducted me. I became the youngest professional in US history to be inducted into the Professional Speaking Hall of Fame. I’m excited to go back to Eric and find out what step two of the journey is.

It seems like he got the better deal out of this trade.

Yeah, I did.

Refining And Mastering Your Craft

I have a couple of things to that. You made me think of validating a discussion I had years ago. I gave a presentation at a conference, and it was for first time people had been to that conference. It was an industry conference. At this conference, there was a lot of nepotism with the founders. People got up there. We’re talking about stuff. My session is like a 4.8 out of 5.

I pitched to do it again the next time. There are always first-time people at a conference, and the feedback I got from the owner-manager was, “This is like the same presentation as last time.” I was like, “Yeah,” I know it works, and it was good. I made some tweaks, and it’s meant to go to a hundred people who are new.”

I think this is something people don’t realize. Sometimes you’re disappointed when you see a great speaker for the second time, because you realize it’s a performance. They’ve worked on it. When they say, “I’m the guy in the back, those are what I’m talking about.” That’s what makes that impact. It’s a lot of practice. I probably do a new track every couple of years, tied to a book, and it’s not great the first 4, 5, or 10 times. It gets much better as you get feedback from the audience.

I’ve been at this for a long time. I pretty much have three keynotes. I’ve been doing this since I was seventeen, but any of those three will bring the house down. People will be laughing hysterically. They’ll be inspired. They’ll learn things that they’ve never heard before, but I only have three of them. The same is true for comedians. We see Jerry Seinfeld or Ellen DeGeneres up there cranking out jokes, and it looks like it’s off the cuff. They’ve done that joke hundreds of times in common.

I cannot remember who it was. It was either Chris Rock, Dave Chappelle, or one of them had a thing where he goes to this local club for three weeks and tries stuff, and then takes it a little bigger, and then takes it on the road after he has crowd-tested it. It’s not like it comes out of the box that way.

No, it’s not. Jerry Seinfeld made a documentary called Comedian, where they followed him doing this at different small comedy clubs. At Brand Builders Group, we don’t just work with speakers. That’s a big part of what we do, but we work with personal brands, which are executives, entrepreneurs, or experts. Anyone who is an expert in building their personal brand. Some of them want to be speakers. Some of them want to create info products. Most of the clients, literally about 57% of the people in our program, aren’t creating a new offering at all.

They’re using their personal brand to drive traffic and awareness to their existing company, to the thing that they’re already doing. Whether it’s speaking or writing, it is the same way. Excellence is never an accident. There’s a thing in writing. I don’t know who said this, but I found this to be so true. They say that there is no such thing as a great writer. There is only such a thing as great editors. It always comes out as junk. It always comes out as garbage, and then you have to clean it up. It is that practice.

Excellence is never an accident.

Make it bad, make it better. You gave these hundreds of free speeches, and at some point, I’ve heard you say you were described as one of the world’s best-kept secrets. We hear that term a lot. Why is that a bad thing?

That’s not a compliment. Here’s the thing. When people hear Brand Builders Group and they go personal brand strategy firm, a lot of times their mind goes to vanity things, like vanity metrics or colors, logos, and fonts. They’re like, “You guys help people with growing their social media following and becoming famous.” No. It’s not about vanity. It’s about humanity. It’s about service. What we do is we help people who are experts become more well-known.

The reason this matters to your question is, imagine if somebody had the cure for cancer right now, like literally had it, but because they were shy or because they didn’t like marketing or they didn’t like podcasting or they weren’t comfortable in front of a crowd or they didn’t have a budget or they were too shy to tell anybody. That would be such a disservice to the world. You have solved something that will help so many people, and nobody knows about it. That’s a tremendous disservice.

We’re working with what we call mission-driven messengers. These are people who are not trying to be famous. They need to be well known, not because they need to be well known, but because the thing that they are an ambassador of, the thing that they are championing, there’s a problem that they have solved. It’s no different than Mother Teresa solving or being an advocate for poverty.

Defining A Personal Brand

She needed people to know about her work. Some people have heard this term, and we’ll talk to both the people who are tuning in to this, who are probably leading organizations, and then leaders within the organizations. How do you define a personal brand? Talk a little bit about what it is and what it isn’t.

One thing about us is that we’re very data-driven. We have a data science team. One of the very first things we did when we started this was invest over $100,000 into a PhD-led, followed by traditional academic rigor, a national research study. We wanted to answer that question with data. There’s a lot of data in the book. We’re giving away the audiobook for free on this. We’ll share with people how to get that.

The short summary is this. Personal branding is simply the digitization of reputation. When people hear personal branding, they tend to think of new things and technological things. What the data points to, as our experience corroborates, the word you want to think of is reputation. This isn’t a new concept. This is an old concept. It’s as old as time.

What matters is that, doing the same things you would do to build a reputation offline, you treat people the same way online. You don’t have to understand personal branding. If you understand reputation, then you can do personal branding right. If you don’t understand reputation, you’re going to do personal branding all wrong. It’s about building trust. We say automating trust at scale.

The only difference is leveraging the tools of the day to extend your reach without adding more time to your calendar. That’s what it’s about. That’s why we say it’s mission-driven messengers. It’s about service. It’s about going, “What problem can I solve? How can I be useful to other people?” It’s not about vanity, followers, or going viral, but your business does benefit tremendously. There are some data points on this that drive the empirical metrics of a business. The things that matter most are directly impacted by the executives having personal brands.

Origins Of The Brand Builders Group

I’m going to dive into the mechanics of this in a sec, but I wanted to maybe have you also tell a little bit of the BBG origin story because it’s similar. It’s very hard to give up good for great. I see a lot of people at the time who lose their job, they get thrown out, they fire a partner. It seemed like the end of the world at the time, and people are in that stage now, but they needed that in order to get great. We’re willing to give up bad or okay for a shot at great, but it’s much harder to give up good. I’ve seen a lot of people struggle with that. Tell the origin story of how you and your wife even came to start this business, because it might resonate with people.

To understand the origin story of Brand Builders Group, we have to go back briefly to our first company. My wife and I met as business partners in our first business. We had a mutual friend in college. The three of us decided to start a company with one other person when we were in our early 20s. We grew that business to eight figures. We had a couple of hundred people on our team and 5,000 clients, and everybody was winning.

We were making money, our clients were making money, our team was making money, and shareholders were making money. Life was good, but it was intense. It was a very hard driving culture. One day, we walked into what we thought was a routine finance meeting. A few weeks earlier, my wife had been asked for her opinion on the direction of the company. My wife is a redhead, and she’s passionate.

Some would call her opinionated, but she’s very direct, and she doesn’t mince her words, and she told them exactly what she felt. A couple of weeks later, we walked into a meeting that we thought was routine, and they said, “Today is your last day. Your services will no longer be needed.” We had started that company from scratch, cold-calling out of the Yellow Pages phone book. We literally ripped the phone book into fourths and physically had Yellow Pages in our hands.

Phone book for everyone under 30 is a thing that used to get printed. It was yellow or white and had phone numbers on it. Your kids sat on it when they were younger to get a little boost at the table.

She got fired. It’s not just her. Two other female executives also got fired. There was a lot of stuff going on. Anyway, these three women got fired, and I knew that was not the right thing. I believe that wasn’t the right thing. I resigned. Our income went to zero, our team was gone, all of our social media, our podcast, our customer list, and our email database were all owned by the company. It all disappeared overnight.

Within the same week, within a few days, I got a phone call from somebody I hadn’t talked to in a couple of years. It was a gentleman named Lewis Howes. I had met Lewis when my first book came out. My first book was called Take the Stairs. I was interviewed on this up-and-coming podcast called The School of Greatness with Lewis Howes, and I thought Lewis was cool. I was like, “I like him. We’re the same age.”

I said, “You should write a book one day.” He’s like, “I’m thinking about it.” I was like, “Let me share with you everything we learned.” Everything we did as a first-time, no-name author, like broke as a joke to go, “How did we pull off hitting the New York Times?” It was all this sales strategy. Lewis hit the New York Times with that book, and our friendship was forged. Fast forward, a couple of years go by, and we lost touch. I didn’t need anything from him. He didn’t need anything from me.

He calls you that week, proving that life gives you what you need sometimes, not necessarily what you want.

Exactly. He said, “I don’t know why, but I feel like I’m supposed to call you. My business has grown a lot.” He had grown from about eight million downloads when I had been on the podcast to, a few years later, about 30 million. That was like eight years in. He had like 30 million downloads on his podcast. He said, “I feel like I need your brain on my business. I’m spread thin, and I’m generating a lot of revenue. I’m not keeping much of the profit. I’m being asked to do all these things. I’m stressed, I’m overwhelmed. Could I spend a couple of days with you?” It was like, “My calendar is wide open.”

“Let me check. It’s Thursday.”

We didn’t have a company or anything. He came to our house. We were in the basement of our house with a flip chart, asking him questions and mapping out stuff. He said, “These are two of the most powerful days I’ve ever had in business. This is what you were born to do. This is your new business.” We’re like, “Whoa, no. This is not our new business. We don’t have a business. We don’t have a team. We don’t have technology. We don’t have a checking account. We certainly don’t have an audience.”

Lewis said, “That’s okay. I have one. I’m going to bring you on my show, and you’re going to tell everybody all the stuff you told me about how to build a personal brand. I’m going to tell the whole world and we’re going to start working together.” We started working with Lewis, and over the next couple of years, his podcast grew from 30 million downloads to 500 million.

Setting A Singular Focus

Talk a little bit about the focus, and then we’ll dig a little bit into Sheehan’s Wall concept, but what was he doing beforehand? His decision to give up all of that was what changed everything for him.

He was doing what a lot of people do, which is too much, too many things. One of the things that we say is that multiple streams of income are what everybody hears about. It’s the stupidest piece of financial advice on the internet. I have seven private clients who are billionaires with a B. I’ve been around a lot of wealthy people, and we’ve now built two eight-figure companies. We’re not the richest people in the world. I’m a long way from the trailer park where I was born and raised by a single mom. Nobody got rich from multiple streams of income. Everybody who got really rich got rich from doing one thing super duper well.

That’s true for companies. A lot of times, you see any business before $10 million in revenue, particularly a service company. They do this one thing and get known for it, and then you can add, but you get yourself diluted early on.

That’s one of our flagship mantras, “If you have diluted focus, you get diluted results.” That line comes all the way from my first book, Take the Stairs. That was even before we started the personal branding business. That’s in general going, how are we not seeing this? In Lewis’s case, he had seventeen revenue streams. We took him through this exercise that we take everyone through called the revenue streams assessment. We list out every revenue stream on the wall, and we measure things like, “How long you’ve been doing it? What’s the growth rate? How stressful is it? How life-giving is it? How much natural momentum is there, and it fits out the score.” This podcast thing that he was doing, he barely even viewed as a revenue stream.

If you have diluted focus, you get diluted results.

It wasn’t as big as the revenue at the time.

No, not even close. It was more like a traffic source to the other things he was doing, which is what a podcast is for most people. For most people, it’s not a business model, it’s a traffic source, and us included. Our podcast is decently sized, but it’s not enough that we can run a huge business off of it. It drives leads. Honestly, the only thing I ever did for Lewis that was of any value, and I didn’t even tell him to do this, I asked the question. I said, “It seems like all the momentum is with the podcast. What if you shut down all this other stuff and went all in on the podcast?”

You never expected him to say yes, right?

I know. To his credit, he shut down multi-seven figures in revenue, and he went all in. It does apply to big businesses and small businesses. We’ve had this experience in our first company. We shut down like a $2 million division. Four years later, the company quadrupled. We’ve done this with the Brand Builders Group.

We had that experience. We had launched a new company. We had launched a new division, and that division was growing 30%, 40%, or 50%, but it was 5% of the revenue. All the attention was taken away from the bread and butter. When we stopped doing it, the acceleration rate in the core business was tremendous. Everyone hears this advice. You and I know a lot of entrepreneurs. A lot of times, they have a little bit of ADD and I’ll talk to them, “Great, I’ve got Brand Builders Group and then I started brand whatever group and then I started whatever group,” and then I checked back in the year and the new two things are falling apart and the core business is hard. I’ve seen that movie so many times.

If you think about this as a visual, if you’ve got ten units of resource, whatever those are, it’s time, team, talent, technology, capital, prayer, like whatever your units of resource are. Every company has some number of units of resource, but let’s say you had ten. If you have ten initiatives going, then on average, each initiative gets one unit of resource. If all you do is stack all ten units of resource on one initiative, the likelihood of that one initiative succeeding goes up exponentially, because you’re competing against a world where everyone takes 10 and divides it by 10.

It’s the domino effect. You know the number, how many dominoes would it take? Each domino can knock down a domino 50% bigger than itself. If they’re all in a line because of momentum. How many real dominoes, with that logic, does it take to knock down the Empire State Building?

I think this is in the book, The One Thing, by Jay Papasan, isn’t it? It’s not very many.

It’s 29. I’ve asked it in a speaking and sometimes people say, “One.” I’m like, “It cannot be one.” I said, “It’s a real domino.”

It’s a real thing. That is true. You don’t have to be any smarter. You don’t have to work more efficiently. You just put all of your best resources on fewer initiatives, and the likelihood of those succeeding goes way up. If you have diluted focus, you get diluted results. It’s not about diversification. It’s about concentration, particularly in the beginning.

Let’s dive directly into the new book, Wealthy and Well-Known. Whether you’re a company leader or you’re someone in a company whose profile is growing in visibility, it’s got things that can help you, particularly when I think about this concept in terms of someone at a company. Can you explain Sheehan’s Wall? I heard you speak and talk about this, and this was a major a-ha for me. I think it applies to the company and a company leader. It applies to someone in a company in terms of what they’re known for. I think it’s the opposite of focus. Doing this is the opposite of a lack of focus in some ways.

By the way, you mentioned this earlier. We’re giving away my new book for free on audio. If you’re an audiobook listener, if you go to FreeBrandAudiobook.com/Elevate, you can get it for free right now. We will give you the whole book for free on audio. One of the core concepts that you referenced is called Sheehan’s Wall. By the way, we named this after a colleague of mine named Peter Sheehan.

He taught me the origin of this concept in a more corporate environment. We’ve since adapted it to personal brands, but it applies to both. If you think about any market, in any industry, in any geography, there are two different groups of people. There are those who are unknown. They’re struggling with obscurity. They’re unclear, they’re untrusted, they’re not recognizable, they’re unknown.

This can be within an organization, too.

Absolutely. On the other side of the wall are the people who are well-known. They have notoriety, they’re recognizable. When we say the book title is Wealthy and Well Known, this is what we’re talking about. It is becoming well known, not like famous, just well known for your trade. Between these two groups is this giant wall that we call Sheehan’s Wall, because we named it after Peter. The people who are unknown, what they tend to do is they look at the people who are well known and they think to themselves, “I’m going to do all the things that they do.” They look at it like Gary Vaynerchuk, who talks about all these different topics. He talks about music, sports, entertainment, Web 3, cryptocurrency, wine, and social media.

The answer must be to do a lot of things.

He talks about a lot of topics, or they look at it like The Rock, Dwayne Johnson. They go, “This guy has so many revenue streams. He owns a football team. He owns a sports drink. He owns a tequila brand. He has a clothing line. Now he has men’s facial products and he’s a comedian, he’s an actor.” They’re like, “I guess I need to have multiple streams of income.” You’re on all the different platforms, trying to go, “I need to be on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Meta.”

It’s interesting, you find most people nail one of those, even when you spread across all of them, they’re hard. It’s hard to do one right.

It’s hard to do one right. What happens is you bounce off the wall. If you think of a wall, if you think about swinging a sledgehammer and trying to knock down a wall, if you hit all these different spots on the wall, nothing is going to happen to that wall. It’s going to take forever to knock that wall down. If you hit the same spot over and over, eventually the paint chips, and then there’s a crack, and then there’s a divot, and then you carve out a little hole, and then you punch through. When you punch through and you pull back, the entire wall comes crashing down. That’s how every wealthy person got wealthy. They got wealthy through one thing first. It was concentration first, then diversification.

They used that leverage and that awareness. You’re a famous athlete, and then you launch a perfume line, and people buy it. It doesn’t work. No one knows you.

Even entrepreneurs like Elon Musk. People are like, “He has all these companies.” In the beginning, Elon Musk made his money from PayPal. Jeff Bezos made his money from Amazon. Sara Blakely made her money from Spanx. Jamie Kern Lima made her money from IT Cosmetics. It wasn’t like they had 50 different things going on. They had one thing going on. A lot of times, when executives or entrepreneurs hear us talking about personal brand, one of the mistakes they make is they think, “This guy is going to teach me how to make courses or become a coach or a consultant.”

We can help people do that, but our actual default strategy is to go, “No, the reason to build your personal brand is that’s the fastest path to cash.” The fastest way to monetize a personal brand is to drive traffic and awareness to the thing you’re already doing. Don’t think of it as like, “I’m going to become Mel Robbins and I’m going to launch a podcast and it’s going to take me away from my day job.” Think of it more like Richard Branson or more like Elon Musk going, “I’m using my personal brand to drive awareness to my company or companies.”

That’s an interesting case study in itself because you attach it tightly like Elon, you then have to be careful about how you use that in attacking your core buyer constituency. It doesn’t seem like, “I don’t have a branding company, but that doesn’t seem like something I would offer in my consulting services.”

No, it’s not. Here is the thing that’s interesting about that. It shows you how much people respond to a personal brand.

They tie how much the product is tied to the person.

Elon recently would be, call it a negative example, at least from financial performance. That’s happened to him a few times. He smoked weed on Joe Rogan’s show, and they took a huge hit, but then it came back. The flip side is true. Coming back to the data in our study. We asked Americans these questions, so 82% of Americans agree that companies are more influential if their founder or executives have an established personal brand.

Eighty-two percent of people say that. Fifty-eight percent of Americans said they would be willing to pay more money to receive services from people who have personal brands, even if they don’t work at a company. It’s pretty compelling. Here’s another one. Sixty-seven percent of Americans said they would be willing to spend more money on products and services that come from the companies whose founders have personal brands that align with their personal values.

What you’re talking about is an example of the negative. You do something that doesn’t align with my values, and it costs you. The data proves that people are more likely to recommend you, buy from you, they’re more likely to work for you, and they’re more likely to pay more money for the services you provide if the executives of that company have personal brands that people recognize. It’s like we trust people more than we trust companies. It has a negative and a positive one too.

Building A Personal Brand In B2B

That’s the whole influencer world. Now you’re talking about corporate influencers and outside. Let me ask you. I think people get it. We’ll use the Acme company. The Acme sells to the customer, and the CEO is very public. What does it look like for a CEO of a B2B company, where the customers are not the end consumers, it’s not marketing, they sell some wholesale distribution thing? What does the brand look like, and how does it speak to people differently, maybe in a B2C world?

Are you asking what they should do to build their personal brand, or are you saying, how does it apply?

How does it apply? It seems a little different. I think people who are leading, like Elon Musk or Nike or a direct-to-consumer brand, feel like they have to speak directly to the end customer or audience with their brand. In the B2B world, it’s a little bit different. A lot of times, you don’t even know who the leader is. You don’t even know their name. Does it look different in there when you think about your brand?

I think in some ways it could. There’s an argument if you’re in that expert category, like speaker, author, coach, or consultant. We do work with some. Probably 30% of our clients are in that category. That’s more like, “I’m trying to create a transaction.” On the executives and the entrepreneurs, more than the B2B side, again, 61% of people say they’re more likely to trust a company or organization if the founder has a personal brand. You go, “It matters to the extent that trust matters.”

The higher the requirement for trust in your business, the more important it becomes to have an established personal brand. It’s going, “Do you want your vendors to trust you? Do you want your employees to trust you?” We even see this with people who are raising capital. It’s your ability to source deals, your ability to source investors for a new division or a new company, or whatever. If you think of personal brand, the brain tends to go to influencers and dancing and pointing on TikTok. It goes a little haywire. If you think reputation, and you go, “All I’m doing here is building my reputation digitally. I’m taking my offline reputation.”

The higher the requirement for trust in your business, the more important it becomes to have an established personal brand.

Maybe this company is known, like everyone at this company gets back to people in 24 hours, and they’re responsive, and that becomes the reputation that the company is known for.

Just known at all. There’s nothing more frustrating than trying to talk to a human at a company and feeling like there are no humans there. All you get are robots, and I’m not connected to anybody, and I cannot get a hold of anybody. It’s different if I can see the founder or an executive on LinkedIn, and I can read their posts. Even if it’s like, “Here’s what we did with our kids over Father’s Day, or “Here’s my baseball team.”

In the world of AI, even more important than ever, I think, being human and having a real connection, people are going to believe so much is fake. That’s going to be even more important.

Yes. Amen, Bob. I used to think it was so stupid and trivial to be like, “Why would someone post a picture of what they were eating for lunch. Why do we care who your favorite sports team is?” Yet, every single person will tell you that the most engagement you get on any post is the ones about your kids, or the ones about your dog, or your birthday, or whatever. If you think about The Rock, I happen to be a fan of The Rock. I’m like, “I wonder what The Rock eats in a given day?” When he posts a picture of a hundred sushi rolls, I’m fascinated by that. To your point about AI, absolutely. We’re starving for the human connection.

You’re not going to outthink the machines. You might as well do what you can possibly do better.

Out-human. Lean into being more human.

When Does A Personal Brand Becomes A Threat

There are a lot of CEOs and company leaders tuning in to this. There are also a lot of up-and-coming high-level company leaders. You and I have seen some great ones, like Salesforce or some companies where the sales leader has a great brand, or here’s how we help companies, and the thing, or otherwise. I assume some people find it a little tricky when they’re an up-and-comer at a company. They want to build their personal brand as an expert in whatever their function is or the industry is, which is ostensibly helpful to the company.

I’ve seen some of these personal brands that are aligned with what the company does and ones that aren’t. Not that they’re going against it, but their personal passion and the things that they care about or have talked a lot about. When does it become an asset in your career, an asset that someone wants to bring you along because you have that? When does it become a little threatening to the people you work with?

Let’s say you’re a rockstar marketing person for a company, but you train puppies on the side, and people at your company are seeing you constantly talk about puppies and this, and you’re a puppy expert. They’re like, “I don’t feel like we have her full attention at work.” I feel like there are a lot of opportunities here, but there are some landmines too. How should people think about their personal brand and where it’s portable and an asset, and where it’s an asset or liability for their current company? I know that was twenty questions in one, so you can peel that apart.

It’s an important question, and it’s a tough question. I don’t think companies are doing a great job. I think in many ways, companies are scared of the personal brand. If companies embrace some of this data and formalize some of this training and things, they could benefit a lot more. If someone is going to leave your company, they’re going to leave your company either way.

Pretending like they’re not doing it or trying to hold them back from doing it, I don’t think, is the thing. Here’s the tip of your question that I think was sharp. When is it a threat? I think this is the question that both companies and individuals need to understand. I think you answered your own question. I think a company starts to view a personal brand as a threat the moment you start monetizing your message in some way other than through the company.

That’s a great distinction.

If you and I are business partners, but I’m making money on the side doing this thing, there’s immediately a breakdown of trust. The same as if you’re my boss and I’m your employee, and I’m doing this thing over here, making money on the side. There’s a breakdown of trust.

Versus, I’m winning the hot shot, top finance, up and coming finance person in the world, smartest finance whiz, like all of these things that tie to the company that bring attention to the company. They’re portable. You could use those to get another job, but they’re portable. They’re supporting what the company does.

That’s where it becomes a threat. It is when you start moonlighting. You’re monetizing outside, even at Brand Builders Group, all of my speaking income, all of my author royalties, they all flow into the company.

You don’t have your employees. What is your policy on gigs or other ways? I’m curious. We never talked about this. Do you have an official policy on that?

If you’re an employee and you’re a full-time employee and we’re paying you a salary and all that stuff, you represent Brand Builders Group, first and foremost, just like me. The number one thing in my bio and on my profiles is a co-founder of Brand Builders Group. On the cover of the book, it says right across the top, “Co-founder of Brand Builders Group.” We’re working together as a team. What happens is we’re in the world of speaking, consulting, coaching, and stuff. We’re feeding our employees coaching clients, but we have a pay plan that says, “If you land a keynote, this is how we share in it.” They’re on the same pay plan that I am.

I’ll tell you roughly what it is, because it’s different across specific things. I figured this out in grad school. My grad’s MBA project was trying to figure out how to create a financial structure. We do 35%. More or less 40% goes to the person or persons delivering the work. If it’s a consulting gig, there could be two people on the project, there could be ten people on the project, or it could be one person.

We are roughly carving out 30% to 40% for that. We roughly carve out around 10% for the sales to the person or person who sold the thing. Not just talked about the thing, but collected the agreement and the cash. Whoever got the deal signed and the money in the bank, 10% roughly for that. We then pay another 15%. So far, we’re at roughly 50%, 40% for delivery, and 10% for sales. We pay 15% to the person or persons who generated the lead.

Often, there are at least a couple of people involved there, and we parcel that up. That leaves 35% that goes to the company. The idea is we run the company on roughly 20% and then we roughly make a 15% profit margin, which is a healthy company, which creates growth and opportunity for all of us.

You’re putting that out there for everyone, and they understand it.

You got it. I don’t think every big corporate enterprise is going to be able to apply something like that. What I would say, if you’re the young hotshot in the company, I would go, here’s the thing. If you have diluted focus, you get diluted results. If you’re going to work at your company, work at your company. The best way to succeed in anything is to succeed in the previous thing you were doing.

There’s a whole section in my Take the Stairs book, which is from fifteen years ago. That’s like, crush it where you’re at. Dominate the thing that you’re doing. That is the fastest way to succeed at the next thing that you’re doing. I think if companies don’t like to openly have a policy for this, then a lot of it happens in secret, and it naturally pushes them apart. I think the dividing line is money.

Crush it where you are at. Dominate the thing you are doing. This is the fastest way to succeed at what you are doing next.

You made it simple. Make your star rise, but it’s rising with your company, and it’s pulling your company along, and it’s logically connected. Therefore, you are increasing a portable asset, but it is not threatening, and it’s added to your company.

Bingo. I would also say that if you’re the founder of the company, that would be the same way. In some ways, if you get into or get deep into entrepreneurship here, but if you look at the valuation of a company, the valuation of a company is inversely proportionate to the amount of risk. The more dependency there is on the founder, the more risk there is, and the lower the valuation.

If you want to sell your company, you want to make people believe you’re not important to it.

That’s right, but we know the data says that the closer your personal brand is tied to the company, the higher the financial performance effectively in all these different categories you’re going to experience. How do we think about that? We think about it like launching a rocket. When you’re launching a rocket, it takes every ounce of energy you can possibly muster to get that thing off the ground into orbit.

That’s when things are at the highest risk, too, in the beginning.

Your personal brand is like the side booster. Once it gets out into orbit, then that personal brand can peel off and the business can travel on its own. It does become its own thing. In Brand Builders Group, we’re a great case study of this because we use my personal brand to get it off the ground. We are systematically removing me from the day-to-day operations in the business. We’re not planning on selling the company, but we do want it to run without us just the same.

I was going to ask you, but now I could probably answer the question using the same framework we tested. That person who is starting out, the twenty-year-old in the company, trying to build up their brand within the company, I would assume it’s like the Sheehan, like get known at, Rory is the go-to person for X. It would seem like become known for doing one thing well. Is that the best thing you could do to build your internal brand?

Absolutely, and I would argue, your external brand. You can start late on your external brand and go fast. Look what we did with Lewis. Our external brand went to zero, but we had one relationship, and your relationships are the irrefutable accelerant to success. You’re going to build relationships by doing an excellent job at the thing you’re already doing. You want to be known as the expert, but you also want to be known for character traits like over-delivering, hard work, integrity, and accuracy.

You want everyone to use the same words to describe you, probably.

Bingo. If you step away or you get fired or some other opportunity comes along, it’s going to come along because even though when my wife got fired and I resigned, we lost everything. It was all owned by the company. It all disappeared. The contacts in our phone disappeared.

All you had left was your personal brand, at the end of the day.

All we had was our reputation. By the definition of personal brand, the digitization, we didn’t have any of that, but we had our reputation. People trusted us. People knew what we were about. That’s because we were all in on the previous thing, and that catapulted Brand Builders Group. We went from 0 to 8 figures in half the time in our second company with no debt and no investors, and the two of us as founders, and rebuilt the team.

Now we’re back up to 50 people, a couple thousand clients. We work with some of the biggest authors and speakers in the world, John Maxwell, Ed Mylett, Lewis Howes, and so forth and so on. Dr. Gabrielle Lyon, Dr. Henry Cloud, and all these amazing people. Also, executives and entrepreneurs that you’ve never heard of, but they’ve built great businesses, and they’re building their personal brand alongside it.

Why You Do Not Need A Huge Social Media Following

You touched on this earlier, but I think people would be maybe surprised by your take on this, and that debunking the concept of a social media following being key to a strong personal brand. I think a lot of people go off and have a million followers are like, “That’s all I need.” There’s some messed-up stuff these days, too, where someone has a million followers because they do hair extensions. They try to use that to comment on the Middle Eastern complex political situation. It’s not what they’re known for, but it’s a head fake because people go, “They have a million followers.” Maybe they know what they’re talking about. That seems like an example where you make a mess of your brand.

Actors have done that for years, musicians, and lots of people. The thing I would say is that people massively overestimate the importance of a large social media following. Here’s the thing. We have a lot of clients who are very well known, like Lewis and others. They have millions of followers. The formula for going viral is pretty simple. You have to create content that is interesting to everyone. How do you create content that’s interesting for everyone? Sometimes you don’t even have the spoken word because then you overcome the language barrier.

You go to the lowest common denominator, too.

You go to the lowest common denominator. You go to the thing that applies to everybody. It’s pretty much politics, religion, money, health, or relationships. It’s pretty much those things, and that applies to everybody. By definition, a word we would use in the business community is commoditization. You are applying in the most general way to the most general number of people. That is how you get lots of followers. That is the opposite of how experts get paid a lot of money.

Companies get paid a lot of money.

How companies get paid a lot of money. By being the go-to for a small number of people that you serve in a deep way.

You subscribe to the thousand raving friends model.

Absolutely. There’s a technique that we teach in the book called Fractal Math. Again, you can get the book, the audiobook for free, FreeBrandAudiobook.com/Elevate. It’s called Fractal Math. Here’s how this works. Using a thousand since you used a thousand. Let’s say you have a thousand customers who buy a $30 product, and you go, “What’s the best way to double the revenue of the business?”

A lot of people would say, “Easy, go get another thousand customers.” That would double the business. I’m not going to say it’s the wrong way to do it, but it’s the hardest and most expensive way to double the revenue. Why? It’s because the most expensive customer is a brand-new customer. Why? It’s because they don’t yet trust you, and trust must always take place before there’s a transaction.

New customers are the hardest and the most expensive to get. You can do that. The other way to double your revenue is to go deep. That’s what Fractal Math is. Fractal Math is a concept that says that 10% of your customers will invest at a level 10 times what they’ve already invested. You take your thousand customers, and we go 10% of that would be 100, and they will invest at a level 10 times more.

If they invested $30 the first time, they’ll invest $300. Now you have 100 at $300, which is also $30,000. Now you doubled the revenue, didn’t add a single customer, but it keeps going. You go, if you have 100 that gave you $300, 10% of that $100 is 10 people that would give you $3,000. Now you added another $30,000 in revenue, again, no new customers, and 10% of those people, so 10% of 10 is 1, 1 person would give you $30,000.

You started with a thousand that gave you $30, that’s $30,000. You got 100 that gave you $300, then you gave 10 that gave you $3,000, and 1 that gave you $30,000. You quadrupled the revenue without adding a single customer. That is the fastest path to profit maximization. It’s serving a smaller audience in a deeper way. That’s the key to making a lot of money quickly.

You don’t need millions of followers to make millions of dollars. Look at Brand Builders Group. We’re a healthy, eight-figure business. We don’t even have a hundred thousand followers on any platform. Many of our clients have millions and millions, but our business is much larger than most of them, if not all of them, because we serve a very specific mission-driven messenger, either an executive, an entrepreneur, or an expert in a very specific, deep way.

The fastest path to profit maximization is serving a smaller audience more deeply. You do not need millions of followers to make millions of dollars.

Mistitling His Second Book

Last question. I’ll modify this because I usually ask about personal and professional mistakes you made. You probably answered it last time. What’s the biggest branding mistake you think you’ve made that you learned from in your career?

Do you know my answer to this?

Yes, I do know. It occurred to me it’s the book.

It’s a mistitle for my second book.

That’s a good learning for everyone.

The short story is that when my second book came out, my strategy was I was going to release a TED Talk and have the TED talk go viral at the same time I launched the book, because this was like the golden era of TED Talks. Brene Brown, Adam Grant, Mel Robbins, and Simon Sinek were all doing this. Their TED Talk would blow up, and then their book would blow up. Also, Angela Duckworth.

I was like, “I’m a speaker. I know how to speak even more than I know how to write.” I did that and it almost worked. My TED Talk did go viral. It was called How to Multiply Time, but my second book, Procrastinate on Purpose, doesn’t sell worth a squat. Even to this day, I think it’s sold like 15,000 units, which is not nothing, but it’s a far cry from the hundreds of thousands of units that my first book is sold.

You go, “What’s the explanation?” It’s the same messenger, same exact content, released in the same moment in history. The difference is the title. What we’ve learned is that clear is greater than clever. When it comes to titles, clear is greater than clever. I thought Procrastinate on Purpose was so clever. It was clever. I want a title that people have never heard of. I want something counterintuitive.

I want something shocking. I want something that people will go, “I don’t even know what that means.” The good news is I achieved that goal. The bad news is nobody knows what it means, so they don’t buy it, but when TED asked me, they didn’t ask me for the title of the talk. They said, “What is your talk about?” I said, “That’s easy. It’s about how to multiply time.” We now operationalize this as one of the lessons that we teach in Wealthy and Well-Known.

By the way, Wealthy and Well-Known, this is meta, because it’s part of the title of this book, which is what we call the I want blank test. It is a great title, which you could also apply to a subject line in an email or to a headline of a website. You should follow the I want blank test. You have to figure it out. You have to ask yourself the question, how would your perfect customer complete the sentence, I want blank? If your title or headline completes that phrase, I want blank, it’s a great title. I want good to great. I want the secrets of the millionaire mind. I want to think and grow rich.

You don’t even have to do anything. You can think and grow rich. The best title that we’ll probably see in our lifetime is the four-hour work week. I want a four-hour work week. That’s part of why we call this new book Wealthy and Well-Known, because our clients want to be wealthy, and they want to be well-known. They don’t want to be rich and famous. They want to be wealthy and they want to be well-known. They want to semi-quietly be known by those who it matters to be known by, but to make a real difference in the world.

Get In Touch With Rory

Rory, thanks for joining us. Where can people learn more about you, Brand Builders Group? I think you gave it a few times, and it’s FreeBrandAudiobook.com/Elevate.

It’s FreeBrandAudiobook.com/Elevate. I would say go there. Our story is in there. It’s free. If you go there, then we’ll get connected to you in all the ways.

Thanks for sharing your story with us. I always love hearing some of your learnings. I appreciate what you do to bring other people’s brands to life.

Likewise, Bob. I’m so grateful to you. You are a great example of a personal brand. You built so much trust over a long period of time by over-delivering and adding value to people. It’s an honor to be here and be associated with you.

We’ll look forward to the next book, and we’ll have you back.

Important Links

• Rory Vaden
• Rory Vaden on LinkedIn
• Rory Vaden on Instagram
• Brand Builders Group
• Take the Stairs
• Wealthy and Well-Known
• Procrastinate on Purpose
• Free Brand Audiobook
• Rory Vaden on Building Your Brand and The Perfect Book Title
• Eric Chester on LinkedIn
• The One Thing