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How To Build A Personal Brand Quickly With Dain Walker

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About this episode

“Ever invest in something that seemed incredible at first, but didn't live up to the hype? For example, I really wanted to love the show Mad Men. I really tried to watch it and love it, but it just didn't do anything for me.”From the transcript

Building a personal brand can feel uncomfortable. You know putting yourself out there could open doors, attract opportunities, and grow your business, but self-doubt, overthinking, and the fear of being judged can make it hard to take that first step.

In this interview, Omar sits down with Dain Walker in the studio to explore what it really takes to build a personal brand that creates impact and drives revenue. From the difference between branding and marketing to creating a brand people actually remember, Dain shares his unique perspective on standing out, overcoming self-imposed limitations, and building a reputation that works for you long after you've hit publish.

The episode also features a few fun and hands-on activities, including the Spot the AI game, the Offer Table game, and Dain's Imposter Syndrome whiteboard exercise. These moments showcase how Dain approaches branding, confidence, and personal growth, while adding plenty of laughs and unexpected insights along the way.

Your expertise alone isn't always enough to get noticed. Hit play at the top of the page and find out how Dain thinks about building a personal brand that attracts attention, earns trust, and creates real business opportunities.

MBA2841 How To Build A Personal Brand That Makes You Money With Dain Walker

Resources:

Imposter Syndrome Exercise: Download Link

90-Day Brand Plan by Dain Walker

Watch the episodes on YouTube: https://lm.fm/GgRPPHi

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How To Build A Personal Brand Quickly With Dain Walker

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The $100 MBA Show — How To Build A Personal Brand Quickly With Dain Walker. Machine-transcribed; use the interactive transcript above to jump the player to any line.

Ever invest in something that seemed incredible at first, but didn't live up to the hype? For example, I really wanted to love the show Mad Men. I really tried to watch it and love it, but it just didn't do anything for me. As a marketer and business person, the show was a little bit of a disappointment. Marketers know that feeling, the optimized for the numbers that look great like impressions, but then we don't see revenue. LinkedIn has a word for that, Bullspend. Instead, you can get the highest ROS of major ad networks with LinkedIn ads. Cut the Bullspend advertise on LinkedIn. Spend $250 and get a $250 credit. Go to LinkedIn.com slash MBA show, Terms Apply. When you're at work, you never know when you'll be interrupted, but with the Dell Pro powered by Intel Core Ultra with V Pro, no matter what distracts you, your laptop won't. It's battery optimized for the way you work, with built-in intelligence that quites distractions when you need to focus. Your laptop will help keep you locked in,

even when it's bringing your dog to work day. Build for those who stay in the flow. The Dell Pro. Build for you. Dell.com slash Dell-Pro. I'm about to sit down with the branding master, Dane Walker. He is the author of the 90-day brand plan and the host of the agency podcast. A podcast that absolutely has blown up recently with over 1.5 million subscribers on YouTube. We're going to talk about a lot, especially when it comes to how to develop your own personal brand, get out of your own way, and make sure your brand helps you with everything you do, including your marketing and your sales. He's worked with big brands like Nutrition Warehouse, Culture Kings, and the very funny Andrew Schultz. He's going to share with you the same exact strategies he used in helping build their brands so that your brand is better by the end of this episode. Let's jump right into that conversation with Dane Walker.

Welcome back to the $100 MBA show. I'm your host Omar Zenhom where I deliver practical business lessons three times a week Monday, Wednesday, and Friday to help you start, grow, and scale your business. Hey, if this show has helped you in any way, it would be amazing if you dropped us a quicker view on whatever app you're using right now to listen to this podcast. It helps me and my team bring you new episodes every week and more importantly, more entrepreneurs will be able to discover the podcast so you can help someone else start their journey. Dane Walker, so good to have you here, man. Omar, good to see my friends. Love it. I love the fact that you're here in Sydney and are so good at what you do. Thanks, man. Amazing. I want to start with the fact that you know, you to me are one of the best people in it comes to branding and I'm sure you get a lot of people that come to that want to work on their personal brand, but they think they have a marketing problem. How many in terms of like give me a percentage. How many of you helped thousands of people? So out of a percentage, how many people actually have a marketing problem? How many people have a branding problem? That's a great question. I think oftentimes people look at

branding, marketing, advertising and sales and mash them into like one big play-doh ball, but they're actually different colors of play-doh, if you will. I think when you look at branding, for me, you know, branding is really the experience, the feeling you get in your gut, how something is perceived, how you associate it, to belong to something. Whereas marketing for me is the framework or the structure to make something happen. So the best analogy I could really put together for people to understand the difference between all of these systems is that let's say you're driving down the road and you see a big billboard for a Mercedes dealership and let's say there's a new C-Class car. That's an ad. The advertisement is out in the world talking to you. You might see the ad through meta or Google or like pixels shop somewhere that says, hey, there's a product that exists that you should buy. In that advertisement, there are branding assets, colors, fonts, typography, logos, and those elements are there to create an association. So you might go, wow, that looks prestigious

and sophisticated and cool. Whereas if you see a red bull billboard or ad, you might go, wow, that's like human potential pioneering and rebellious. Whereas, you know, even if you have the same product, let's take Virgin Airlines and Qantas, the associations that have with Qantas, Heritage, National Pride, and Australia's home. Whereas if you're losing your bags. Yeah, I'm losing your bags, of course. And Terrible Customer Service. And then if you look at Virgin, it's the exact same product at the exact same location with the same color palette, the same everything's the same. Like it's the same plane and the same process and system and everything. But the brand feels totally different because the association with the logo and with Richard Branson is that this is a brand of entertainment, fun and rebelliousness and kind of youth. So these associations are carried through advertisements. Yeah, that's brands. The advertisement itself is the frame where the brand's experience typically out in the world. Now back to the

analogy with Miss Aides, if you go into the dealership because you see the ad, now you're in their marketing system, right? You walk through the dealership, even though it's a retail experience, it's a marketing system. You walk on the car lock, the product sitting there with price tags, hoping that you buy the car and maybe you ask a sales rep, take me for a drive, one of these cars so I can experience it. You're in the sales process in the marketing structure or system. So the fact you went to the dealership is because of the marketing system. The marketing is like the conductor that sits behind all the advertisements that uses the branding to pull you in to buy the product. So whether you're Alex Hamorzy selling books or seminars or you're Miss Aides selling cars or you're an airline trying to get people to buy your ticket instead of the competitors ticket, the thing that really separates people is the brand. So when you ask the question, how many people mistake marketing for branding and how they know the difference, you can't just rely on a marketing system, devoid of branding and expect to win. You need these systems to work

together. Like a cylinder is in a carriage and they all have to work together in simultaneous like kind of orchestra if you will. So would you say somebody that's marketing their business, marketing their products without even spending time on working on their brand? Are they wasting their money? No, no, always. I've met plenty of entrepreneurs that make $10, $20, $30 million without really making an effort to build brands. Sometimes people can be really great at logistics or they have a really potent network or they're in a market that has a deficit. So for example, if you're the only manufacturer that makes toothpicks and know how the competitors make toothpicks, maybe you don't need to build a brand because you're the only toothpick factory in the country. Yeah, I think it's like glitter is there's like two companies that sell all the glitter in the wealth that they don't really need to do a lot of branding. So there are these outliers where they don't do a lot of like branding in the way we know branding. They still have a brand, they still have a reputation. People still trust these companies. But essentially for the most of us like we don't have a logistical moat around our brand that allows us to do something

that others can't. If you're in an industry where you're competing and other people are offering the same thing or near the same thing or an adjacent thing to what you're offering, if you're not investing in branding, you're not tuning your car to be as fast as possible. So let's look at this from the analogy of a racetrack. If you're building a vehicle which representing your company, one would assume that you would want to have the most efficient fuel efficient and fast and maintainable and secure and safe vehicle on the track. If your vehicle's not safe, you're running a risk of like not even being in the race. If it's too slow, you can't keep up with the competitors in the market. If it's not cool enough, maybe the fans might not buy merch and cheer the brand on. So let's imagine the racetrack analogy. Let's imagine you're building your own vehicle which is your company. Why would you not want to have a beautiful design? Why would you not want to have the cleanest vehicle with the best methods and the best processes? I think for me, if you want to build a company that's mature that can fight in the market that the customers care about, you should look at the design. Why? Because it's communication. If you want to sell as much

as possible, it's really the audit communication. And if you think about a logo, that's a piece of communication. A color palette is a piece of communication, a tagline, even the font you choose. So imagine I had a piece of paper and on that piece of paper, we use like old school type, like a typewriter type. And I type out the words, I'll be waiting for you. It might be like, oh, it's a poem. If I get a crayon and like scratch it on the page and create a different looking font and says, I'll be waiting for you in big bold letters. Now that's like a death threat. Yeah. All of a sudden. Right. So like just changing the font, that's a extreme example. But like if you just look at the good one. Right. Even get different fonts like some fonts are a bit heavy and funky. Other fonts are like slim and elegant. Fonds, typography, even like negative space, how you curate photography. These are all just signals that associate with people viewing it and an immediate heartbeat like, hey, we're kind of rebellious or we're kind of sophisticated or

we're kind of cool. Most brands don't really have a personality in their associations. They tend to rely on some pretty basic associations. So for anyone listening right now, what I'm about to say might offend you. So let's just put a big warning label on that. So these are the associations that everyone brings up in a workshop. So not to impress anyone listening, but to impress upon the magnitude of this. I've done thousands of workshops across the world for about seven years. And something I've noticed is that in a brand workshop, the same things get said in every workshop. I can't wait to hear this. Right. And the associations are usually this. When I ask the client, like, who are we as a brand? Why should the customer choose us? Why are we fantastic? The resounding response is almost always, well, which trustworthy? And we care about the client because we have integrity and we're honest and we're authentic. And we want to do innovation in this industry. And we have the best products. And it's nothing wrong with any of those things. But everybody say, yeah, those stations are benign. They're not interesting at all.

The problem with being benign is that people would choose you if someone else is exciting. Okay, let's use an example here. So what's your team member's name again? Josh. Okay, Josh. Josh is behind the camera here. Now, Omar, if you raise your arm, and tickle your own armpit, is that funny? No, that's pretty benign. But if Josh, if I got you to come over here and tickle Omar's armpit, that would be a violation. Yeah, right. But the idea of it is kind of funny. Yeah. If you actually got up right now, you'd be like, well, it's kind of strange. It's kind of appropriate. You need your brand to not be benign and to not be a violation unless that's what you're going for. And he's just somewhere in between. It needs to evoke an association. Josh, gotta use the feather. Yeah, use the feather. Right? Yeah. If you use the feather, that would be kind of super weird and whimsical. But those associations will be different. Right? But it's a weird analogy. But I think what people tend to do with these associations is they tend to just pick the thing that's kind of weirdly safe. Yeah, vanilla. And it's not interesting.

And you know, there's an ancient Chinese proverb that says if the nail that sticks out gets hammered, and people read that like a negative. But I'm like, well, you want to be the brand that sticks out and gets hammered with leads and attention. If you want attention, stick out. Yeah. So, yeah, with these associations, what we spend our time doing is we work with clients to figure out what other associations could we build? And there's a quick exercise if anyone cares to do this. Yeah. Let's get these associations. Okay. So let's do it with your podcasts real quick. All right. So number one is if this podcast were a car, what car would it be and why? That's a good question. Probably Alexis. Alexis. Yeah. What color? It would be black. Black and what model? Alex 470, which is like the four wheel drive. Okay. Very specific. I like that. Yeah. And what message are you trying to send? Let's say you wrap that car in this brand. What would you hope people look at and go, oh, that brand is kind of what? It's practical. It's reliable. And it's actually a

little bit upscale and thoughtful. Yeah. It's kind of like a little sophisticated. It's cool. Like how you dress. You always dress very sharp, very elegant. But there's a bit of an edge. You have a sneaker with a suit and a plane shirt. So there's a sophistication to you. But then there's like a down to earth like relatable, not you humbleness, but like a cool factor, right? You're cool, dude. And you're funny and you're like with it. So there's a few associations. Let's do another one. If you were a drink, it doesn't have to be alcoholic. I've had a drink. Probably maybe like some sort of electrolyte drink like a sports drink. Okay. Why? It has use. It hydrates you. You feel better afterwards? Epic. Okay. And then if you were a movie character, an anime character or some fictional character or superhero, Jack a Chan. Why Jack a Chan? Because Jack a Chan is willing to do what it takes to get the get the shot. Break the ribs. Jump off a balcony. Exactly. Yeah. I mean, lots of lots of reps. He's got like thousands of movies. And you do that and you're sure you put in a lot of reps into everything you do. All right. We'll do one more. Let's say,

okay. If you were a song, what song would you be in? Why? That's a tough one because I love music. So start with this genre. Then maybe pick an artist and then come down to a song. This a tough one. Because I'm a huge Michael Jackson fan. So I have to go with Michael Jackson. And if I had to choose a song from him, it would be Man in the Mirror because it's self-reflection. Yeah. Okay. So then if you put those analogies together, you can start to create a mood board. Yeah. So we've got some photos of Alexis. Got some photos of Michael Jackson on stage. Jackie Chan. We started thinking about Man in the Mirror. Like you start to put these pieces again. I know this sounds a little weird. But what we do in these workshops with these clients is we start to pull this material together. And then they kind of reveal their associations. So when we ask ourselves, okay, what two, three words exist in this montage of material that explains who you are. It's not trust. It's not usually like honesty or authenticity. There's something else. Yeah. So then we look at that material and go, okay, cool. Like, why isn't it shown up on the website? If this is the energy of the brand, if this is the aura, like, is this coming through the photography? Is this coming through the font? Is this

coming through the content on your social media feed? Yeah. On the social media feed in your emails. I want to see you like kicking a table over and like screaming and then there's some music in the background and then you're saying something hilarious. Like Jackie Chan would. So I think if you think about as silly as this is, if anyone sits down and just does this, if you were Kyle, what would you be? If you're a drink, if you're a character or a movie star, if you're a song, if you were a sport, if you were a place, if you were a hotel chain, you know, you could kind of do this with anything. If you're a household object, it doesn't matter. Just write down six or seven of these things, write down the associations. And here's the trick with the associations for anyone who wants to take us to the next step is are there any visuals, colors, is there textures? Like, can you feel things? Is it grainy and textual or smooth and polished? Is it bright? Is it dim? Is it daytime? Is it nighttime? Are there smells? Are there sounds? Is it loud? Is it quiet? Is it messy? Is it calm? So you just start to look for this material and then just look at your website and look at your content and go, it's not there. So the client usually realizes in a moment

of like 20, 30 minutes of doing these exercises like, man, we're off brands. We don't have a brand. It's like, yeah, we need a personality. You can still do serious business and still be trustworthy and still do these cool things, but have some energy to it because if you look at a brand like Holly Davidson, they're not trying to be trustworthy. People trust that they're like some of the best motorcycles in the world and everything they do is kind of rugged and masculine. Yeah, and freedom and open road and yeah, all that because trust is a result of you relating to someone. Yeah. So you're a funny dude. If you meet someone else who's funny, you're going to have more trust for that funny person you met than someone who's maybe a bit stiff. Yeah, yeah, right? Have a hard time getting a little killed and all that sensitive. Yeah. But I love that exercise because it takes people outside the mundane day to day business talk. Yes. And get some to think and be a little bit more playful and to just have fun a little bit and that brings the personality. Yes. And I love what you just did. And I think that's an amazing exercise for everybody to do. Don't just listen to it. Do it guys. Take out a paper and pen and rewind and go through it because

that's one of the best pieces of advice I've seen when it comes to branding. Yes. And this, this is something that we find brings energy into the room. So there's a quote we have arrival and it's that what does it mean to be creative? For me, the definition of what makes something creative because some people think to themselves, I'm not a creative person for whatever reason. I believe everyone's creative, especially when we're children, it's just kind of beating the out of us usually. When you're a kid, you're imagining stuff and creating stuff all the time. So our definition of creativity is just intelligence having fun. So when people come into workshops and they're building a brand, it's serious. They're like, we need to make money. We need to get leads. We've got to pay bills and do overheads. And it's like, yeah, but we can have some fun at the same time. Yeah. And yeah, why not? Why not do it and have fun because otherwise you're miserable. You want to visit like that? Awesome. Support for today's episode comes from Square. You probably know Square is the thing you tap your card on at your favorite coffee shop, restaurant, salon, or local store. But for the person running that business, Square is a whole lot more than a way to get paid. Square brings the tools you need to run and grow your business together in one

system from payments and appointments to staff, inventories, sales, and customer relationships. Whether you're selling lattes, cutting hair, detailing cars, running a restaurant, or starting something new, Square keeps your business tools working together so you can focus less on managing the moving parts and more on what's next. Whether you're starting something new or looking for a better way to run the business you already have, Square gives you the tools to take payments, manage your day to day, and keep growing. And right now you can get up to $200 off Square Hardware at square.com slash go slash MBA. That's squ ARE.com slash geo slash MBA. Run your business your way with Square. Get started today. Have you ever called a business and it was straight to voicemail that's clearly from 2015 and you just hang up? Yeah, I know I do. But so do your customers. They do that too. That's why at some point you just got to say let's fnqo. Today's episode is brought to you by Quo Spelt QUO

the business phone system built so you never miss a call with Quo all your calls, text, and voicemails live in one place. So anyone on your team can pick up a conversation, see the full history and you can set up a minute on any device, keep your existing number and add teammates as you grow. No IT, no hassle. Plus Quo's optional built in AI agent handles after hours calls, answers questions, and even books appointments so you never miss a lead even when your team is offline. Money's on the line. Always say hello with Quo. Try Quo for free plus get 20% off your first six months when you go to Quo.com slash MBA. That's qu.com slash MBA. You've worked with so many companies, so many brands. One of the things I noticed on your website is that you have a testimonial from Andrew Schultz, the hilarious comedian. I want to read his testimonial because it's absolutely hilarious. He says the difference between a rat and a squirrel is branding. Dane will turn your rat into the most beautiful squirrel you've ever seen.

What did you learn from working with Andrew? I love Andrew. Yeah, so three years ago, I got a DM from a comedian. His name is Mark Gagnon and he's cool cat. He's based in Brooklyn in New York and he's like, dude, love your ****. Can we connect sometime? I was like, sure. And I remember like getting on a call and I had blue light glasses at time. These big thick, cool blue light glasses and he gets on the call. He's like, dude, he's like, make it fun to me immediately. I come up with what he said, but he's like roasting me. My man, this guy's rad. He's like, hey, man, I edit the flagrant podcast with Andrew Schultz and our couch thing. And he's like, hey, man, like we want to work on the branding for the show. And I was like, for sure. I remember asking him, like, what does Andrew want? He just feels like YouTube has YouTubeiness, like where the thumbnails were kind of YouTube-ish. And he said that Andrew doesn't care if he gets less views, but he wants the brand to be cooler. And this is around the time if you watch the flagrant podcast with Andrew Schultz, he went from the old set to the new set, like the subway

station set. And they were like, we need to figure out like what the brand identity should be. Anyways, long story short, we started working with Andrew. He's a blossom work with man. He knows exactly what he wants, the way he wants it. But he's just a funny dude. He came to Australia with Mark. And I remember I bought tickets the first night and I text Mark. I was like, hey, man, you're like, great show. He's like, dude, come to the green room. And I remember like freaking out. Because I'd worked with Andrew online. But now it's like, oh my god, I'm going to the green room. Andrew Schultz is going to be there. And I went in there and the dude's like super humble. Came over to me, gave me a hug. I was like, man, thank you so much for all the help on the branding. Like it's sick. I gave him a jacket. And then Andrew looks at me, he goes, what are you doing now? I was like, I don't have any plans. He's like, he come with us. So then I'm like, hang it out with Andrew Schultz. And he's policy for the night and getting to know the guy a little better. And he said something really prolific to me that really stuck with me. He said to me, we're on this boat in the harbor in Sydney and we're hanging out talking. And I asked him, I was like, hey, man, like what is like, what is comedy? Like, what? What even is it? Because he's a deep.

Deep guy. So like you see him on stage, he's saying unhinged like degenerate, like jokes, nonstop. But then off stage, the second he gets into the green room, it's business. Like his team huddled around him for about an hour and they're debriefing every joke, every beat, every minute. Everything it has a meticulous feedback loop. And I was like, these guys are executing. He's calling Schultz. He's telling you to videographer what to edit. He's like, this clip needs to go out tonight. Like he's doing business. And then I'm hanging out and then he's talking like this deep philosophy. And I'm asking like deep philosophical questions. And he explains to me, he goes, day and when you're on stage and you're a young comedian and you're bombing nonstop, what happens? He's going out on stage and you're just testing stuff because you don't know who you are. You don't know what your jokes are yet. You're trying to figure out what's funny. What's not funny? Who am I? Am I funny? Can I make the career or not? This guy is drunk and hates me, but she's laughing way too hard. So he's like, it's just it's just an intense environment. But he said, what happens is at the beginning, you're trying to make material that you hope the audience loves. Yeah.

And he said inevitably the greats. And he said, not everyone gets to this point. They do what he phrases is finding their voice. So he's like, what you should do as a comedian every time you go on stage, whether you're a content creator, a musician, you know, a podcast or whatever, you should have the goal in your mind to poke another brick out of a metaphorical wall in front of you and reveal just a little bit more of yourself every time you go on stage. And I was like, wow, and he goes eventually the wall comes down and you can just be yourself. And he said that that's been his experience in doing anything is if you want to be graded, you have to go on this journey. But then he'll say the most unhinged insane thing like the court he's got from me. But he's deep. He's super deep. Yeah. So full. And he has an interesting brain where he just knows how to recognize patterns. He knows how to teetle line to the very edge. It's gonna say like he's so such a good example of that branding thing you talked about where it's like he's not vanilla, but he's also not going completely. He's tight walking the line. He's right on the edge of violating

constantly. Exactly. And sometimes he goes a little too far and he comes back and he fixes it. But I think that's where comedy has to live. And I think that's honestly where any content creator needs to live. Yeah. You got to live on the edge of like what's the scene is acceptable because otherwise you're just going to fit into the back and you're never going to have that moment where something's going to really crack the internet. A thousand percent. And I always say the worst thing in business is being ignored. You know, most people they live in the space where they don't offend anybody. Yeah. But if you're not offending anybody, you're not really attracting your audience. You're not really showing people like, hey, this is who I'm for. And this is one I guess. Exactly. And there's a few things you can use to amplify your content. So if you want me to dive into it. Yeah. Okay. So whatever you're doing, whether you're trying to podcast or you're trying to create a piece of material, everything should be considered to be amplified using a couple mechanisms. So here's a few of them. Number one is familiarity. Okay. So for example, we're talking about comedy because I know you love comedy. So like you're like, dude, this is really relevant to me. This is familiarity. Like I want to hear this story. Like I

care about these things. When you watch content on the feed, let's say you're a parent and you have a newborn and you're watching content of other parents who have newborns, that's just familiarity. Just like we're in the same boat together content. Then you have things like nostalgia. So like remember when Nokia, brick phones were a cool thing. We used to play. We used to play snake. We used to like make our own ringtones. You see that content? Yeah. Dude, I totally forgot about that. Then you have futurism. So this is going to happen next and you'll see that happen with politics or marketing. There's always predictions of the future. Then you have inflammatory people creating arguments trying to trigger you or gaslight you. That's going to get attention. Dangerous things, humorous things, weird things, mystical, esoteric things. Like you have to think if you're trying to get attention, you have to amplify it with a bit more than just trying to be trustworthy. Humans like fireside stories. We like movies. We like music. We like drama. Like

put a bit of flair, a bit of theater into whatever you're doing in business. That's all I'm saying. I understand that like businesses are about getting money. I totally get it. But like you're going to get way more attention if you want to stand out of communication and how to make things interesting to consume. Yeah. And lean into the parts of you that are a little bit different, a little bit unique. Whether it's your story or your background, your experiences, your failures. I think that that's a great advice. I want to shift gears a little bit. In the last couple of years, a lot of people have used AI to do their branding. What are your thoughts on people just trusting chat GBT or Claude to like come up with the rologo or the branding kit? That's a good question. I think guess Adam, I podcast who had the funniest way of phrasing this and his name is Frank Grief. And he said, you know, he calls it the AI slop cannon. And the unfortunate thing is if you put in a prompt and it spits something out, it's probably unless given really good instruction, it's going to be a little benign. I don't have a problem with someone creating a logo in AI or

using chat GBT or these systems like Bill Brandt assets. I think it's a good thing that creativity is becoming commoditized and that more people have access to this. I like to think about imagine someone logging into the internet for the first time and they're 18 and they want to build a business and they've got a little bit of pocket money and they want to create like whatever the thing is that they want to create. Get started. Dude, awesome. Like they can punch a prompt in for free and get a logo. And like I've seen 12 year old kids do lawn mower logos and then go print the shirts out with their mums credit card and then start a little lawn mowering business. And I'm like, that's amazing. Like kids couldn't really do this stuff like not too long ago. So I love the fact creativity is becoming more accessible and people are utilizing these things. I think where it gets a little slippery is when big brands get a little lazy. Like if you've got a budget and you can build something like legitimate and you're trying to build a multi-million dollar business, maybe don't use AI. Maybe just even if you use AI, at least go talk to an expert or do some consulting because they might notice a few things about what you're doing that aren't that great.

Oftentimes we get a lot of inquiries where someone's built a brand using AI. But the challenge is branding is so many skills stacked together. It's experiential skills. It's tactile, packaging, feeling skills. It's attention activation skills, marketing skills, copy skills. It's super difficult for most people to understand enough about these different art forms to curate a good taste to then tailor something that the customer loves. So I don't sound like I'm bashing AI. I think it's cool. But it has limits. It has limits. And I think if you want to get the most out of it, and we use AI oftentimes behind the scenes to help portray what a brand could look like for a client, we can do really cool stuff now with AI. I think you need to be mindful like how do you put more creative energy into something? So we call it soul crafting. When you're creating something and you're using intelligence and you're having fun, there's going to be material. If you do anything stop there and then use AI, right? Like use your own mind first. Like go talk to your own customers first.

Go be a human and get something first to then give AI context. Because then you get a bit of result and you'll probably get something that's a bit more curated for what you're trying to use it for. Yeah. We talked earlier a couple weeks ago and we were talking about the idea of like AI does have a stench a little bit like you can snuff it out. So it's getting better. It is getting a lot better. But in the meantime, we're going to play a little game. Okay. We like to play a few games here on the show. Yes. This game is called spot the AI. So what we're going to do is yeah, no worry about it at all. So what we're going to do is we're going to show you a logo, a branding, and we'll put this in post or a new tell me if you think it's AI or it's human made. Okay. Ready to go? Like it. Yeah, let's go. All right. This is a coffee roaster called northbound. I'm going to say human. Correct. This is an aerospace company. I'm going to say AI. It's actually human. That's human. Yeah. Okay.

All right. One for one is again. One win one loss. Here we go. Independent Australia. Independent Australia. Independent Australia. This feels AI. It's actually human. Wow. What about this branding kit going on? Definitely AI. It is a hundred percent. It's definitely AI. It's very convoluted and trying to hard. Yeah. It's over the top. Yeah. In the last one, AI or human. This is a branding for a hot sauce. Interesting. It feels AI to me again. You're right. AI. Yeah. Something feels a little off. Not bad. Not bad. Very good. It feels a little like it's like an almost human. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. I love it. Thanks for playing it along. We have another game coming up later, but I want to talk a little bit about when people are trying to build their brand or even like rebrand. Do you think it's easier to start from scratch or is it easier to rebrand? This is a really good question. I think it's always easier to stop from scratch.

Rebranding is actually hotter in many cases, especially if you have a really established brand. So, you know, two of the probably three of the hottest rebrands before actually four of the hottest rebrands we did was Coach Kings. Simon was a star. Like, yeah. He was so fun to work with and talk about someone who makes immediate decisions. I remember being on a call with Coach Kings presenting a logo change, silence hits the room. Yeah. Sounds good. Let's look it in. Okay. The brand had been around for 11 years now. Yeah. Let's move fast. Let's go. But the challenge was like trying to make sure we understood everyone because inside their internal team, they had a lot of creatives and a lot of opinions. So that can always be difficult is when you go to an external company and say, Hey, we have our own internal creatives, but we want to outsource this. You can get some challenges with that sometimes. Yeah. When we recently worked with Mad Max, the entrepreneur owns a his name's Clovis cool cat from California. And he'd been around in the market for about 16 years, I believe. And they were really nervous to make changes because they're like, we don't

want to go backwards. We want to go forward. So it can be quite a stressful thing for an entrepreneur to have retail frontage, signage, staff employees, and then they're changing their logo. Yeah. And they're just in their call of palette and they're changing their packaging. So rebranding is always about what do we keep? What do we challenge the client to do away with? And what do we bring in? And the way we start the rebrand process is always I sit down with the founder and I ask the question, do you have any sacred cows? What are your sacred cows? Are we keeping the logo or are you open to changing it or are you opposed to changing it? He said, look, I think it'd be cool to explore it. And I'm like, okay, like that's okay. Let's start there. What about the colors? Oh, no, the colors need to stay. All right. That's fine. Fonds. Yeah. We can change the fonts. All right. Great. What about the mascot? Oh, we hate the mascot. Can we change the mascot? Okay. Great. So you go through this list and you just literally asked them, is this the sacred cow? Are you open to changing it? Are you opposed to changing it? Are you excited to change it? Like we want to get a

rating on all this stuff. So then we'll be sitting down and do a rebrands. It's a bit easier to go. Okay. Cool. Like just stay away from the palette. Right. Maybe you make a couple suggestions sneakily. But let's start with the mascot. Let's get the client excited about the mascot. Then let's talk about fonts. So I think when you're doing a rebrand process with any company, whether you're working inside as a CMO or whatever, just make it checklists of literally everything and agree with it upfront. Yep. So then you're not working from ambiguity. You're working from a place of clarity. Building a brand from scratch is way easier than that. You basically sit down and go like, what do you want this to become? The challenge sometimes can be, well, we don't know. Yeah. We need to work through that. But I'd find it a lot easier to build from scratch because you can kind of pull something that doesn't exist into reality. If you're good creatives and you got a great team, that's a bit of an easier process than sometimes the bureaucracy or the internal structure or the belief systems of the team. Now in nutrition warehouse, this was the hardest one because I think 38 odd staff members had the logo tattooed on them. What? That's a cult. So when

we're like, we're going to change the logo. The CEO was like, wow, I'm going to have this tattooed on them. I'm like, yeah, but that's kind of cool because they have the old legacy. Yeah, legacy. Yeah, I like it. I like the phrase. And I remember him being really apprehensive about changing the logo. Mainly because he was like, man, you know, this is going to cost me like $3.6 million in signage, right? And I was like, yeah, he's like, do you think it would be worth it? I'm like, probably. Yeah. He's like, all right, let's change the logo. So yeah, rebranding's tough. But I think if anyone's listening to this and wants to do it with a heritage brand that's been around for a decade, yeah, you have to play homage. You can't do away with the past. If people love the brands, yeah, you have to bring some of the essence forward. Otherwise, you can lose the respect of your clients. I love it. You remind me of a quote by Tiger Woods. Tiger Woods says, I can take somebody who's played golf all their life and make them a champion in five years. If I had five years with them, I can make them a champion. But if you've never played golf, I could do it in two years. Yes. And the whole idea is that you have to unlearn a lot of habits, a lot of things that you

picked up along the way. Weird thoughts or weird tendencies that you just inherited through the journey of your business and your brand. Do you ever have like a branding session and then they say like, pretty much everything's a sacred cow. And they're like, what are we doing here? Yeah, we have that happen. But we always come back to the reason with, which is like, well, why are we here in the first place? We're not cool anymore. And we had one real estate we worked with. And we went through and they said, we're open to everything. Then we started pitching stuff. And then they said, we're not open to any of this. And we sat back down again and said, hang on, why are we here? Yeah. Well, we want to be cool. Okay. But your brand's not currently cool. We know that. We have to make changes. Yeah. But we're afraid. We have to let go of the past guys. Yeah. We have to embrace the future. People have this fear that if they change their brand, they're going to turn into a werewolf and like, scare away all their customers. If you do it right, what tends to happen when you do a really great rebrand is all your old customers lean in and they go, oh,

this is a sign of something good. Yeah. Usually a rebrand is a good signal. It's a signal that like, we're innovating, we're adapting to the future. If it's done well. And people you reintroduce them into the ecosystem, you reap their interests every time Apple re designs a logo or Pepsi re designs a logo, whatever, people lean back in. You do have legacy brands. I cook a coli. I don't think would ever rebrand because they've just created something epic from the start. But it's important to have it on this conversation with the founder and challenge them on their beliefs and go, look, in service of what is the greatest question I've ever asked any entrepreneur is like, okay, we're changing the branding in service of what? Well, we want to be cool. We want new customers. We want to attract better talent into the business. We want people to respect us. We want to intimidate the competitors. Okay. Well, then are they good enough reasons to do this? Yes. Okay. Are your sacred cows that you want to hold on to helping or hindering this process? Oh, they're hindering it. Okay. What do I need to get in front of you to let go of these

sacred cows? Yep. I want market research. We can do that. What else? I want to see more concepts. We can do that. What else? No, that's it. Okay. So if I can put evidence in front of you and I can give you more concepts, you'll be open to this. Yes. Now, here's one more trick for any strategy just out there is what I call mild medium spicy. So get the new brief. Yeah. And mild is exactly what the customer ordered. So let's just say you run a restaurant and a customer says, I just want three eggs and a little bit of salt and pepper. Just do that. Don't do any garnishes. Don't do anything crazy. The first play that comes out is like, hey, I did exactly what you asked. Here's three eggs. His little bit of salt, his little bit of pepper. I took a liberty and I made a second plate. The second plate is two eggs, one sausage, a tomato, and a little hash brown. And they're like, okay, so it's not crazy. But it's like, you sure you don't want to try this dish? And they're like, well, actually, I kind of like want to try that one. This one seems a little boring now. So this is what I call the mild medium spicy technique. Spicy is you bring something out. And what I typically tell my team is you became a CEO. What are you going to do this brands? If you own a 100% of the company?

Oh, well, I would do it like this. I'm like, go to town. Yeah. So what I get my team to do is do the mild and a good absolute bowl of the world, go to town and then do something in the middle. So when we come back to the client, we go, here's mild. Okay, cool. Here's medium. Oh, that's a bit better. Spicy might be like, hey, I kind of reinvented the breakfast. What you have in front of you here is a beautiful egg parfait. And the next to it is a nice, beautiful piece of toast. And then here's a beautiful soup and whatever you change the entire makeup of the dish. What tends to happen is the client goes, that's really exciting. I really want to try this spicy stuff. But I'm a little afraid that it's a bit too pompous or whatever. But what happens is we get a Frankenstein. So if you show them mild medium spicy, the client usually goes, hey, cannot take two or three things out of the spicy thing and like half of what's in the medium and like one of the boring things. And can we recreate a dish based on those ingredients? For sure. Another client feels in control. They're letting their sacred cows go because they've seen an array of options that stem from safe through

to risky and or from like benign through to violation. And you get to find out like if a violation is a 10 and benign is a one, you're like, where do you want to go? Do you want to become a 7 or 6? So when we worked with Mad Max and Stone Real Estate, you know, Stone Real Estate, we're like, we want to be a 6. Mad Max actually surprised me. Like, we want to be a 9. I was like, all right. So then we allow the client to drive. They are spicy. They're super spicy. We allow the client to drive, but we want to make sure we're doing away with they feel like they're a part of the creation process. Two things on this. I love this this example because I think you know, we're fault. We work with our rebranding on on our MBA. And he did exactly that. He gave us the three dishes. And we did exactly that. Like we really like the spicy, but can we have something between spicy medium or the medium dish? It reminded me of something I just heard from Cliff, who's the co-founder of Canva, who was on stage at Striped War last year, or sorry, last week. And he was mentioning that with Canva, AI prompts doesn't really work for design. Like people don't really know

what they want. They need templates. They need to see things to say, oh, I like that. I like that birthday card. I want something like that. Maybe modify it a little bit. So that example, you just gave the branding that people need to see some choices to say that's more my vibe. They can't come up with this idea on their own. That's not their job. That's your job. So I love the fact that you give them a menu and you also like push the envelope a little bit so that they get a chance to see what it looks like to reinvent themselves. Yes, fantastic. And even if they don't want to choose it, it's like this is what it would look like if we do do that. Yeah. And I think, you know, to the point about Canva, this is really important. When you work with a client, even in the sales process, if you're selling something is like, you have to make sure that there's some structure or some framing to what they're looking at buying, right? And I have a bit of a controversial opinion around sales. Yeah, tell me. And it's that the price is a myth. 100%. If a client says this is too expensive and the salesperson believes that, you need to retrain your salesperson. This is going to get people in a lot of hot water. I've had debates with

people over the years on this. And I believe in my hot hot hot is four things that will get a sale across the line. And in this case, I'm talking about like how to convince a client to pick something for branding purposes, right? How to lock in a logo. Isn't there interest? Yeah. That's in their interest. Number one is the person. Do they like you the person? If you, if they don't trust you, they don't like you, you give them the it, you piss them off for whatever reason, they're probably not going to listen to your opinion. Right. But if they're like, man, I really like Omar. He's like a nice dude. He cares about me. He's invested. I'm not sure about this logo, but man, he really, he's a really good dude. So I'm going to give you more brownie points for that. Two is the products. I have to look at the product and go, this is a good product. You design something really good here, whatever your product is. Three is the process. Is the process fun? Or is it annoying? Like, did you enjoy getting presented with options instead of being told, tells what you want? Yeah. It's kind of annoying if you're told all the time, like, what do you want? Yeah. Like, imagine walking in a restaurant and they're like, hey, what do you want? Is there a menu? Like, nope, you just tell us what you want. You're the customer. You're like, whoa, man, this is kind of too much pressure. I'm just going to go to the next cafe. That's right. Exactly.

And then you need a good process. You need a menu. And then the final thing is proof. Like, what have you done previously? They can bring this equation. If you can go into any negotiation situation and they're like, I like the person. I really like the products. I like this process. This person has proof. The price is not the priority anymore. If you can light those four things up and have those four things like really exciting. Yeah. People will go on a payment plan. They'll borrow money if their mom. Yeah. I've had crazy stuff where people have like sold their car, remogged their house. I don't know how people do this stuff, by the way, to work with me. And it's because it's like, if you can tick those full boxes, man, you can move mountains. You can believe. Yeah. You can get a brand whose hellbent are not spending four million bucks doing the signage. Yeah. This guy's kind of smart. Like, let's do what he says. Yeah, I trust what he's saying. And you mentioned something else earlier about giving people the options, like saying, hey, if you don't do this, this is what's going to happen. This is what the competitors are going to do in terms of your competition. One of the things that we used to teach, you know, we ran a

webinar software for a very long time and we used to run these workshops. And the biggest problem that our users would have was I don't know how to transition from workshop to sales pitch. And when I do the sales pitch, I don't know how to close the pitch so that people can buy my product or service. So we used to teach them this idea of like, you have to tell them what the options are. Not the plan, ABC. This is what you can, you know, these are the payment plans or these are the tiers of our plan. But the option of, hey, you can end this webinar and you can not take action and you can continue to get the results you're getting right now. Or you can go on our free trial by our product, get a result, change your state, change what you're doing and what you're getting out of it. That's your choice. You have to make a choice right now. But some people just don't see it clearly in their head when they're being sold or kind of just like, oh, it's like buy or not. But they don't really understand the consequences of not buying. Yes. So I think that that's a really good tip that you gave where you talk to the clients, they hate the consequences of not rebranding is XYZ. Like you're coming to me for a reason. Things are not working. Exactly. And I love that fact

because a lot of people don't make it easy for people to see the choice they're making when they buy. Exactly. I think you're you're hinting at something else here, which is like, you have to believe it for the client. Right. If you're on a call and the client says to you, ah, this is kind of expensive and you believed what they just said, game over. You're not going to sell anything. Right. And like just the amount of times I've seen someone pulling them off us in a G wagon with a Rolex and a 200,000 dollar handbag and sit down and tell my team, we don't really have much money right now. My team like, oh, okay. Like, did you know see the bag and then what like, literally take the watch off your wrist and buy it, build a brand. Yeah. What's more valuable right now? Building your company or the Rolex on your wrist. Yeah. And my team like, oh, that's kind of harsh. I'm like, no, it's like, if they got money to pay for a Rolex and a G wagon. Right. Right. Like you have to believe that that person is going to give you money, but you have to be the person and showcase the product and the process and the proof that they need to see at their level of altitude, for them to give you money. A hundred percent. Because I think a big problem I see in the sales space is just the lack of belief of the salesperson

believing in the client for the client. Wow. You know when you get these questions with the client, I go, oh, you really think I can do this? I was like, yeah. Yeah. Of course. Like sign there. Let's go. Like, how much more proof do you need? I'm afraid. Why are you here right now? Because you have to talk about the consequences of not doing it. Someone say, well, that's peer pressure. I'm like, no, don't mistake pressure for passion. Yeah. If you truly can see the light at the end of the tunnel for the client, it's your duty and obligation to take him to the light. Sometimes clients just won't go there. And some painful questions you can ask to exacerbate this is like, all right, like Mr. customer, how long have you been in this situation of this frame of thinking? All about two years now. So you've been dealing with this for two years. You're dealing with insomnia, you can't eat, you can't sleep on the weekends, you're stressed out, you're team out listening to like how much more pain do you need to go through for you to make this decision? You know what, man, let's do it. And then they sign the contract. This can be uncomfortable for a salesperson, but so can marriage, so can be a parent, so can go into the gym. Everything's painful. Yeah. Helping your clients make decisions can be a painful experience. But if you believe

in your product, and you believe in your company, and you truly think your stuff is the best, you need to fight for it. And that's a perfect example of showing them the options. Like you can, this keeps suffering or you can sign on the dotted line and we can help you with all of this anxiety. You know, I love that because you have to have clarity. You have to have a clear picture in the mind of the customer. The customer has to see the what the after picture looks like. This is why the before and after pictures in like the health and wellness space work so much because people see what they can be. So if you can't paint that picture for the customer in whatever you do and your service or product, it's very hard for them to say yes. I like this. What you're talking about here is well-building. Yeah. Are you familiar with like the branding as I guys are like well-building? No, tell me a little bit. Okay. So essentially let's say you're studying a fashion label. If you were to say, okay, this suit that you're wearing right now is a beautiful suit. If you were to say, hey, I got a beautiful suit. Look at the fabric. It's made out of cotton. It's 100% recycled, upcycled, whatever. It's good for the environment. I'd be like, okay, like fair enough, like if I care about this things, I might buy it. What's more powerful than that is well-building. So let's say

you do a photo shoot and there's an aesthetic. You're in a place. So well-building is like places and surfaces. So where are you? All you're on a beach. Where? In Monaco and it's sunset and it's kind of cool weather and you wear an apparel shades and it's reflecting off the shades. All of a sudden you have an aesthetic and the viewer is like, I kind of wish I was in that world. That's going to raise their ambition to click-purchase now. Because like, man, I really wish I'd look as cool as Omar in this photo shoot. Then there's other things like objects. So are you interacting with objects? What are the citizens? So are there different characters in this world that look like they're having a good time in a certain way, right? So if you look at Red Bull citizens, there are rebels, there are human pioneers. If you look at Versace, Louis Vuitton, Culture King, Saint Laurent, like they all have these citizen worlds they build out. Ralph Laurent has like this nippo baby, trapey, New York kind of thing going on. It's useful and it's cool and it's like, I look like I'm from a rich family. Old money, yeah. Old money. So you see this aesthetic, you see these citizens, you feel this

temperament and then know the sudden you want to step in and buy the products. Yeah. A lot of people forget that when you're selling your products, you're building a world and you're inviting people to come in and be a part of that world. Yeah. Whether that's the world of Canva or the world of Instagram or the world of TikTok or the world of, you know, this podcast, it's like you have to and most people in these heightened senses to make them care about things. I love that you just said that because a lot of people have noticed like, Omar, you're dressing differently. I got a stylist. I got a personal stylist. Re-ree shot at you. Shout out Re-ree. I didn't meet Re-ree, but she's great. So Re-ree, when she would style me and try this on and she would say things like this. She would say like, yeah, yeah, yeah, this is like George Crowley-esque. This is, you know, Milan Cafe, you know, old money. Exactly. I don't know why those things really allow you to feel the brand or feel the style. Like, okay, instead of like, you know, Navy Blue looks nice on you. It's more like, you know, oh, yeah, yeah. This has been an athletic and that movie did it it it

Oh, yeah, I'm been athletic now. I'm bad man. You know, so yeah, these associations, associations are leaving. Yeah, 100%. Yeah. Today's episode is supported by Rosetta Stone. I absolutely love Rosetta Stone because it's helping me learn Italian faster than I can ever imagine. Why do I want to learn Italian? Well, who doesn't love Italy? But of course, Nicole's family is Italian and I love to have some quick Italian conversations with her mom. And Rosetta Stone just came out with Rosetta Stone sapphire their biggest launch in over a decade. One of the coolest features is chat missions, which turns conversation practice into a game with chat missions. You're put in interactive scenarios and given three objectives, a mission to accomplish like asking how much something costs ordering a cold brew coffee or getting a Wi-Fi password. Along the way, you get real time corrections and feedback to help you sound more natural and confident. It's a supportive way to build confidence before putting your language skills to use in real life. I've been using Rosetta

Stone for over two years and I actually can have some small Italian conversations with Nicole's mom now. Just the other day, she asked me when you're traveling and I said, double-domoniumatina, which means after tomorrow morning, she was incredibly impressed that was able to answer an Italian. How could you put a price tag on a happy mother-in-law? If you want to take your language skills to the next level, don't wait to try Rosetta Stone sapphire. The 100-dollar racial listeners can get 20% off the Rosetta Stone sapphire subscription when they sign up today. This gets you access to Rosetta Stone sapphire in 25 languages. Today's episode is supported by IXL. Listen, the first few weeks of school can reveal skills that need a little more attention. IXL helps identify those areas early and gives kids targeted practice to keep moving forward. IXL is an award-winning online learning platform that helps kids truly understand what they're learning, whether they're building math confidence, strengthening reading and writing skills, or revising science concepts. With personalized practice and interactive learning, IXL helps kids reinforce what they're learning in school and build confidence in areas where they

need a little extra support. As a former classroom teacher, I can tell you that at the beginning of the school year, it's very clear which students need a little bit more help at the start. Those who get that help, those who actually practice at home, really get a head start and they really are able to move a lot quicker throughout the school year. Those who don't often get left behind. This is why I highly recommend IXL because they have features that actually matter, like instant feedback with clear explanations. They organize everything by grade level and skill. They have easy progress tracking and everything is aligned to what kids are learning in school. Make an impact on your child's learning. Get IXL now. The Hunter Alarm VHL listeners can get an exclusive 20% off IXL membership when they sign up today at IXL.com slash MBA. Visit IXL.com slash MBA to get the most effective learning program out there at the best price. I want to move into you know, you have your personal branding walker. You have the agency podcast

brand. I have the 100 on B.A. I also have my personal brand. How do you balance that? How do you know what to invest in when it comes to your business brand and your personal brand? Okay. So there's different realms for branding. I'm just going to go through the realms and then talk to how they're a little bit different and then we can come back and maybe if you want to bone pick these things that you're looking for here. Okay. So there's five realms of branding. The first realm is your core family. So real quick example. I was on stage with Daniel Presley and Stephen Botlett, November last year. I remember coming home after this high of this trip, people were opening doors for me, private security, cause like five saw hotels, first cause flights. Like I was treated like royalty. I know I call them home and reality sinks in because my partner, Ellie, the second I come in the front door, my hey, baby, like I had the best trip in the world. Oh my gosh. And she's like, dude, can you please do the dishes? The kids are screaming, Joey needs a bath and we get to get these kids to bed. Yeah, they don't care about Stephen Botlett. No one's ever been to me. I'm not royalty anymore. So your core, it's not about like who you are in

the world is who you are at home. You know, she just wants a partner to help her. My kids just want their dad. It's it's about character. That's the first world. The second, oh, the first arena, the second arena is your workplace. Okay. So you come to workplace with Josh. Now if you said something to Josh yesterday that you that he definitely needs you to get done today and then you didn't do it, he's gonna be like, damn dude, like I don't know if I can rely on Omar. Yeah. Like I wish he'd do that thing cause now my days like throwing out because of that thing. So or you never play like you like Josh. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, was. He's like, I got to play like a no, but if he on the other side of that, if you're like, I don't play that way, Josh always gets what he wants. Josh is like, dude, I got all of his trials. So in your workplace, it's all about the transaction of like promises and like deposits of withdrawal. So like, like I need this done. Okay, cool. Here it is. So it's very interactive and transactional in that space. Right. So in your workplace, your personal brand is all about like, did you do what you said you were going to do? Are you like fun to hang out with and like, do I care about you or not or do you piss me off? So they're the main things that that tend to happen in that space. You move out another layer, then you have your community. So are you part of

a basketball team? Not a stand. Maybe you train at a wellness club. You hang out with your stylist, like this community is where you're creating a place of belonging. It's not about transaction or getting things done anymore. It's about like, I want to commune. I want to hang out. I want to talk. I want to kind of let my hair down. That world's about fun, spontaneuity, celebration, togetherness, conversation, insights, right? That's storytelling. That's where that kind of exists. Move out another layer, then you have your industry. Yeah. So then, okay, you have a podcast. I have a podcast. We're in the same industry together. So we can either collaborate or compete or both. We can be friend of me's, but I love you. So yeah. I'd rather collaborate. But it's for life. Yeah. Right. So if you look at your industry, the personal brand is a little different because you're either seen as someone who's worthy of being collaborated with or someone who's worthy of destroying and competing with. Then you go out another layer and then there's just the public and the general populace. So let's take a famous brand like Stephen Potlet. We know a little bit about his private life and that's his core and he's very kind of private about it. Then you know, a little bit about his team because he basically films a television show about him and his team.

Yeah, behind the dairy. So you get to see all the interactivity around his team. So if you watch behind the diary, he's building that arena. He's like, hey, this is where we work. This is how I work. And he's showing you that maybe a curated version of that, but a very real at the same time version of that. Then community. So sometimes you see a little bouts of him doing collaborations or, you know, going out with people's podcasts or going on stage and doing keynotes and stuff like that. That's a bit more community led branding. Then you see him partnering up with other celebrities or doing a podcast with someone he admires. That's industry collaboration. And then there's the general public where, you know, people can feel like they can get access to all these arenas. So back to your question about like, how do you build these brands? You have to ask yourself the question of like, what is each version of my brand and service of? So for example, my Instagram is a service of education, a little snackable pieces of education. My podcast is about the guests. So it's in service of let's get other people's stories so that they can share their expertise. I'm launching another YouTube channel, which is me teaching in 20-minute format. That's a bit more

deep lessons that are a bit more tactile and tangible. So my question for you is like, what's the function of each of these versions of your brands? That's a really good way to look at it because they kind of feed off each other. The, the, the, the business brand and your personal brand. Okay. So then there's a flywheel maybe. So let me paint the picture of my flywheel. So I have my personal brands. I make content on social media. That generates content that people can consume. If the content's good, it'll generate fans of the content. If that's really, if the fans like, man, this dude's stuff is really valuable, they might look at my product brands or my company brands and go, hey, I might want to work with rival or I might want to like download or buy a day's book or whatever. If that thing is purchased and then consumed and then here's the next step endorsed. Let's say they go, wow, that book was great. I mean, they tell other people to go buy this book. Yeah, I'll leave a review or whatever. Right. So they're no longer a fan. They're now an advocate. An advocate is someone who's like sprucing your products for your benefit.

And then guess what happens? The flywheel comes back to your personal brand. So if you have a cool company that has proof and accolades and evidence of success, then all of a sudden your personal brand is a lot cooler. And then the flywheel continues. So why is it that Alex Hamozzi or Gary V, could put a 30 second video together and they just say, hey, if you want to have a great business, just go out there and hustle 40,000 comments, like 10,000 reshairs. Like, if I said this exact same thing, no one will care. Right. Why do they get all this extra amplification? It's like, we'll live going around that flywheel some million times. Gary V is going around that flywheel 40 times a day for like 16 years. Yeah. So then he has a whole pause to kind of say, although things because he's already built so many advocates, so many fans, or whatever he shares gets like a secondhand effect to amplification. At the beginning, you don't have that same advantage. Yeah. You have to kind of earn those fans and earn those advocates. Now here's the conundrum is if you're only making a 60 second piece of content a day, you're earning one minute

a day per fan. Not enough. It's not enough. So the game of entrepreneurship right now is like, how do I get more minutes per day? So that's where podcasting becomes important. That's where long format content becomes important. Like how else can people consume you? Yeah. If it's just a 60 second snippet, it's not enough material to build a relationship. So the last thing I'll say to this is, do you know what a parasocial relationship is? Yeah. Okay. We'll feel like they're connected even though they're not. Yeah. Exactly. Right. So I remember being at LAX, I turned around one day, and there's like a seven foot giant behind me and his lose house. Wow. And I turned around. And I was like, Oh my God. It's the lowest house. And I freaked out. And I fangirled. And he got nervous. He's like, who the hell is this red dude? I went straight for the dab. And he's like, bro, like, like, he's like, hello. And my mind was like, he's my best friends. Yeah. But in reality, he's like, you're a complete stranger. I don't know who you are. So what was that? It's like, I consumed 10,000 hours in his content. Yeah. He's never met me. He's at zero. So

when you're making content, how do you have that reaction I have with Lewis with your fans? Is you got to give him enough material to consume? How much I've through my studies found it's about 150 hours. Wow. Of consume content is what is required to create a true fan. Yeah. That's not insignificant amount of time. It's a lot. Yeah. It's a lot of time. But that's how you create a fan. A fan is someone who's going to drive six hours or fly countries to come see you speak. Totally. Yeah. Yeah. And I actually witnessed what you just talked about. I was on holiday with Rumi Saiti, who's an amazing personal finance guy. He's got an Netflix show. We're in Tokyo, Japan. And people are coming up to him asking for photos. And I'm the guy taking the photo. Right. And now it's like, and he was so gracious about it. But it's like, people just felt entitled like, hey, you're me. How you doing? Like, just a picture. You know, like, and he's just trying to enjoy his lunch. You know, I thought it was really interesting because

that's definitely a thing, the parasocial relationship. I want to jump into another game. Let's go. Okay. So this game is called offer tables. This is a game that we play here on the show where I'm going to give you an offer and you tell me deal or no deal. Oh, okay. I'll show you to mount to you. All right. All right. So the first offer is you get to spend a week on a yacht with your five biggest business heroes. But you can never talk about it. Deal or no deal. Will you take that deal? Deal. All right. 100%. Yes. Next one. Your business makes $250 million a year. But you must only use Comic Sans font for everything for the rest of your life. You're a horrible human being. Deal. Deal. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'd be stupid not to. When I was making this, I thought Comic Sans papyrus, which one's worse? I think Comic Sans is the worst. But I think the irony

and the hysterical component of it would I'd have enough capital to make it worth my while. Yeah. You would make it your thing. Yeah. I love it. Next one. No internet for a month, but you get an extra year of your life. Has happened right now. Yeah. Well, man, it's tough, man. I'm thinking about my kids. Selfishly, I would choose the internet. But I love my children. So I'd have to choose. I'd have to choose an extra year of life. Okay. You'll take the deal. I like it. Yeah. Next one. Netflix calls and wants to make a movie out of your life, but they want Vindiesel to play the role. You taking this deal? Which era of Vindiesel? Modern day Vindiesel. Yeah. Deal. I would love to watch that. Okay. Yeah. Vindiesel run brand workshops. Yes. Like boiler room, right? Yeah. And finally, you never need to sleep, but you must only wear purple every day. Oh, that's awful. I never need to sleep. Yeah. Deal. I just dress like a wizard. Yeah. I love it. Thanks for playing

a long day. That's awesome. He's a great deal. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No horrible, but I'd take all of them. I love it. Yeah. So there's something that we chatted about earlier when it came to people dealing with imposter syndrome. This is something that you see people struggle with a lot when they come to building the personal brand. You talk me through like how you guys go through it in the workshop and I'm like, Hey, why don't you do it on the show? Let's get you to do it on the show. So we're going to jump onto the whiteboard and you're going to walk through how people can get over that imposter syndrome through your exercise. Let's go. Let's do it. Let's do it. So this exercise is called the imposter syndrome check. And Danes going to walk us through how to kind of go through this. I'll be the subject. I'll be the person that will be embarrassing themselves. But if you're listening to the podcast right now, go ahead. If you want the full experience over on YouTube, just go to 1-0-0-0-MBA.net-slash-youtube so you can watch and listen. But if you're in the car, don't get into an accident, just keep listening and you can check out YouTube later. Dave, I'm going to let you take over. Here you go. All right,

let's go. So yeah, let's go through one at a time. Couple rules. Number one is you have to be really honest. Okay. Okay. And imagine someone you care, Deely, is in the room and calling you out if you lie a little bit. That's right. Nicole's here. So let's do it. And number two, I want you to apply this generally. So let's say half the time you do, half the time you don't do the thing and give yourself like a five. Okay. So for each thing, we're going around the wheel here on, we're going to give ourselves a rating on a scale of one to five, sorry, one to 10. Let's use the red pen because that might show up best. He's a big fat one. Okay, cool. All right. So what you're looking at here, if you're watching the video version of this is there's a diagram in front of us about how you shop as a personal brand. And these are typically the things that will show up when you feel like an aromposter. Right. So for anyone listening or watching this who feels like, man, I just, I want to do this thing one day. I want to build a personal brand. But I just, I feel like I'm not the person I need to be yet to be able to have the life I want. Not good enough. I'm not good enough. Right. So

then this is a quick thing you can do to audit yourself or anyone around you and do what we love, but also make them be honest. Okay. Great. So first on the wheel here, we have perfectionism. Okay. Let's assume one is that this doesn't show up in your life at all. Right. Your never perfectionist. Nothing has to be perfect. A five is half a time. This is really a problem. Like this is really showing up and I'm trying to make everything perfect. Right. The other half of the time, I don't care at all. And then 10 is, hey, almost everything in my professional life is attached to perfectionism. Okay. And you know, perfectionism might not be a bad thing, but we just want to see how it's a thing. It's a thing. Right. So, okay. So if we're going to rate your personal brands and your professional self on a level of one to 10 with perfectionism. 6.5. 6.5. Okay. Cool. Alright. Hold me accountable. 6.5. Right. Yeah. So we'll just put a 6.5 there. Okay. Let's say people pleasing. Four. Four. And if you're listening at home, you can play alone. Four. Okay. Let's talk about

procrastination on a scale of one to 10. 10 being it's a real problem. 10 being is a real problem. One. One. Okay. So just to count these off real quick, perfectionism often shows up where people are trying to make something perfect before they deploy. Yeah. And this can be something that sometimes connects to other things. People pleasing, oftentimes with imposter syndrome, is I'm afraid that other people are going to be pleased with my activity or my behavior. Therefore, I need to like finesse it before I come back and do it. So these things are all kind of joined at the hip. So let's say yeah, perfectionism is 6.5. People pleasing is a four. Procrastination is a one. If you feel like you just want to get into the heat about. Alright. Periodic is about are you really hot sometimes and then really cold other times. So you go all out doing a thing, then you get tired of it and then you lose momentum or lose passion for the thing. If I'm up and down, that'd be a 10 like really up and down. Yeah. So really up and down would be like really hot, really cold, really hot, really cold. Okay. Five would be like, oh, sometimes I am, sometimes I'm not. I'm not that periodic. I'm pretty consistent.

I'm very careful what I choose to do. So I'll probably say I'll have one or two. Say two. Okay. So let's say two. Yeah. Cool. Let's say pessimism. Pesimism is about thinking what's the point? It's not going to work anyway. It's probably going to break. It's going to take forever. There's going to be those problems ahead. It's predicting kind of the worst case scenario always. I would say I'm a one on that. I'm pretty positive. That's good. Okay. Great. Some of you at home might be really high on that. All right. Projection. Projection for me is putting the blame on outside external factors. I can't build a personal brand because they don't have time. I can't build a personal brand because they don't have resources. I don't have a team. I don't have the knowledge or the skill set yet. It's you're projecting. It's not me. It's this outside thing I need to do first before I can succeed at the thing. Yeah. If I'm being completely honest, probably more like a three on that one. Okay. Not completely free of that. Not completely free. Okay. Posturing is not wanting to do something unless you look

exceptional at doing it. So I've had students I've worked with that have done $100 million, $200, $300 million businesses. Then they want to go build a personal brand. Yeah. And they're afraid that they're going to look stupid because they've got this big successful company. But now they look like an amateur again. So the posturing piece comes back in because it's like, well, I need to show my car. I need to show my house. I need to show you know, like you feel like you need these things, these objects to make it or a vanity metric. Yeah. Follow us to make something worth doing. One or two, maybe. Yeah. That's because you lived in poverty and you didn't care. Yeah. I failed a ton. I failed a whole lot. Okay. Pride. Now, Pride is a tricky one. Pride is the willingness and the ability to take on feedback and the stubbornness to go. No, I know what I'm doing. Everyone just needs to do it my way versus like actually, maybe I suck at this. Maybe I have an eager problem. Maybe like, like sometimes pride can be sneaky and people can find this one tricky to answer because almost everyone wants to say, Oh, no, I don't have pride. But like, sometimes we do have a year as we do have things to get in the way. I do hold strong opinions. So I'd probably say

I'm more of a five point five year. I can see your wife noting ahead. Yeah. Okay. Five point five. Yeah. Okay. Looking at this wheel, now you're very successful. You're a very proficient individual. For those of you at home, you might rank like eight, nine or 10 out of some of these. The question I want you to ask yourself is which one tends to feed the other ones? Yeah. Okay. So in my flywheel, I'm like a 10 out of perfectionism. Like I get super stressed out about things being a certain way. Even in the car drive over here, my team like, Hey man, like you don't need a set to like film that thing you want to do. Like, how about we just start filming it? I'm like, No, we need a set. Yeah. And it's my perfectionism coming back in. Yeah. Because I want to please my audience and therefore I get to procrastinate about it. And I'm periodic because I'm going to wait to do it later. And I'm like, well, what's the point in doing it anyways? So for me, what tends to feed my imposter syndrome is the desire to be perfect. So I can please people. Right. That's my recipe. That's 10 to what triggers me. Yours might be different. If you had a hunch as to what feeds your

wheel negatively, what might it be at times where you fly out of control and your eager gets the best of you and things don't go your way? I think what I've had to work on over the years is probably the prideful stuff. Yes. I think it's the idea of like, I can always get better getting the data to learn objectively what's going right what's going wrong. Having a team to correct me and not just rely on myself and say, Hey, it's working. You know, let's let's keep rolling with it. It's that admitting to yourself that maybe you're not as good as you think you are. Okay. So we'll put a little Pac-Man symbol here. Yeah. So your feeder is pride. This is okay. It's not a bad thing. We're human beings like where you know, creatures of emotions and feelings. So if you had asked yourself the question, would you want to change these numbers? And if you're like, Nope, these numbers are cool. I want to keep them in the zapper. Yeah. They are. That's fine. But if you wanted to change some of these numbers, what would you like to change? We'll use a different color. Yeah. I'd want to change like I'm working on the most is the prideful one. Yeah. So I'd run like it reduced as much as possible. Okay. And what number would

you like it to be? Ideally one. One? Yeah. Just like zero ego involved. Okay. So what are things in your life showing up right now that trigger this that bring this to the surface? Things in my life that trigger this. Or where does this tend to show up most when people are trying to give you feedback? Yeah. I don't need feedback. I'm good. That's a good one. Maybe something I've been doing for a very long time, whether it's basketball, I'm open more things I'm new at. Yes. Like for example, we're new at YouTube, I'm new at poker, you know, like I want to learn because I'm aware of it. But I'm maybe it's not showing up there. So where is it showing up? It's showing up in things I've done for a very long time, like podcasting or business. And where I have the illusion that I know more than them. Okay. Where is that illusion showing up? Because that's very specific language. Yeah. And your posture change there. Yeah. And your turn of voice change a little bit, right? So this happens at workshops where people's framing changes. And that's okay. But is it podcasting or business for you? Probably business. Okay. So business. Because I've been doing that for a long

time and broadcasting. All right. So when you said the illusion happens, what's the illusion? I might not be immediately open to other people's perspectives when it comes to how to approach something in business. Yes. Yeah. They might have a different perspective, a different angle, a different experience. And I need to be a little bit more receptive to that. So you want more reception? Yeah. To other people's perspectives. Yeah. This is really important. Right? So this is real. Now the conversation's gone from let's rank things to okay. Let's try to identify the problem. So for anyone listening to this, this might be different for you. This might be posturing, projection, pessimism. It's okay. It's not about attacking your glittering yourself. It's about bringing the scary thing to the surface. Right. So there's this great quote from Grant Coddern. He says he used his fear as a compass. So let's imagine right now that this isn't a flywheel of impulseness syndrome, but this is an hour compass. And the compass is pointing towards pride and it's saying, hey, if we want to become a stronger, better, smarter, cooler business person, maybe the illusion of

I know what I'm doing and the lack of taking on other people's perspectives isn't a bad thing, but it maybe it's blinding you to some lyrics. Yeah. Okay. What do you think could be learns if you were receptive to other people's ideas, whether or not you agree with their ideas in their face, but the reception alone, what would that add to your psyche? What would that add to your business? At the very least, I'd be more of a well-rounded entrepreneur. I would understand other people's perspectives and know how to approach them because whether they're giving me advice, that advice is coming from somewhere. Like other people that have those thoughts and those people could be my listeners, they could be my audience members. I think it would also allow me to experiment with new things and reinvent myself as an entrepreneur. I think primarily this comes from maybe people that are less experienced than me. And I'm not as respect, like if I read a book from like, you know, Phil Knight or something, you know, like the founder of Nike, then it's like this guy's the boss. Of course, I got a list of what he says. Yeah. Like somebody's just been doing business for a few years and they say, like, you know, you should be doing this, this, and this, and it's like, I'm less receptive, but like, there's, there could be some wisdom in there that I'm neglecting. Yeah.

So there's a quote from, I think it's Abraham Lincoln. He said, you can learn from everyone. Most of the time, what not to do. So even learning the thing that you definitely know what to do, still learning, right? Yeah. Okay. So when we do this exercise and we drill down into each wheel, we ask two questions. One is, therefore what? Therefore, if you were to do this, therefore what would happen? I'd be better at what I do. You would be better. Could you be more specific? I think it would be better. I also probably think it would be more fun. It would be, I would enjoy it more because I'd be trying new things. Cool. Even if it's an uncomfortable thing to hear. I don't like this person's advice, right? Yeah. I'll still listen to it. Okay. What is one action that you can repeat every day that is going to stop the process of this becoming a pot of your business acumen? You reminded me of something that Mark Manson has said before. It's like reminding myself that if I look back at my former self like 10 years ago, I probably would say, I think I was such an idiot. Well, that probably is what I'm going to say 10 years in the future. So there's a good chance I'm wrong about my strong opinions right now.

So it's a good reminder, just remind myself like, hey, there's a good chance a lot of things that I'm doing right now. I'm going to think was stupid. Okay. Yeah. What's something that is what action a day, we can actively put in your calendar that you can track. Hmm. In my calendar, maybe you have a conversation with somebody that maybe differs an opinion of me when it comes to their approach and business. Cool. Yeah. Five minute conversation, 10 minute conversation, plenty of. Five minutes minimum. Yeah. Cool. So how many days in a row could you do that challenge? I can do it at least for five days in a row. Yeah. Five days in a row? When would you like to start? I can start September 1st. September 1st. Okay. September 1st, you're going to make the challenge every day and it has to be in the calendar pre-scheduled. Yeah. A time where you find someone to have a conversation with. Hmm. Could be a team member. How could you find people to talk to about this challenge? I mean, we've got a lot of businesses around here. I can go to the cafe. I can go to the restaurant. You can do like on the street interviews. Yeah. Well, today. Yeah. That's kind of interesting. Yeah. So then how do you turn this into a container that might be used for content?

It could be like a box pop. It could be like interviews. Like you said. Yeah. Yes. So what we found with our students in our program is that the thing that they're most creative, how do we turn it into an actual problem? Then how do we look at the impact? So joy and enjoyment in your life. How do we make it a challenge? And then how do we make it a piece of content? Because then you're taking the scariest thing and you're making it a part of your universe. Yeah. And you're sharing it in your community. And what we find is when people start to do this, they start to loosen up on everything. Yeah. Right. The feeder that kind of impacts the whole wheel when they focus on the main one, all the other ones, then they come down and they're enjoyment and satisfaction tends to go up. Yes. Yeah. Cool. Well, thanks for doing the exercise. Thank you guys. What we can do is maybe give you a PDF of this. And if anyone wants to do this at home, yeah, you could download the PDF and do this exercise for yourself. Cool. We put a link in the show notes and don't judge me guys. Don't judge me. I tried. This is great. Thank you. Really good. Let's get back in there. All right. Okay. So that was a very confronting exercise.

But I got to be honest. And this is for everybody who's listening, you're going to get the PDF you get to do yourself. If you're honest with this exercise, it's going to be uncomfortable. And it was uncomfortable for me to be honest to admit those things on camera too. But I wanted to get the most out of the exercise. And therefore, I kind of had to be real about the whole bright thing. It can be really tricky. I think there's something really powerful about like honest self reflection. And when you can truly sit there and ask yourself these hot questions, because in the PDF, you download this like descriptions is a bit more of the exercise you can do as well. It's really about taking your ownership of the things that are in the way. When you think about impulsive syndrome, we try to externalize it as this outside thing that is preventing us from making content or producing a personal brand or chasing adreams. Whatever the thing is that you're like, I need to go do the thing. These things in the way. And you're very successful. And I mean, entrepreneurs all the time that are super successful and they sit down with this exercise and like, this kind of sucks. Like, man, I didn't realize this was showing up. So the same way of pride showing up for you, it's showing up for me a lot right now in business because you get to this point

where like 70s in my business, I'm like, I got a lot of wins. And then I feel like I'm sitting down taking a device from like team members sometimes. They're like, man, you need to focus on this and you're focusing on that. I'm like, man, kind of sick of taking advice right now. I think everyone should just listen to me. But again, that's ego. Yeah. So when you sit down with this exercise and you ask yourself these questions, it's uncomfortable. And it should be. But there's something cathodic and powerful about getting it out of your head and writing it down. And Tony Robbins has this amazing quote. He says, it's it's if you're in your head, you're dead. Woo. If it's in your head, you just game over, write it down and sit there and read it. And then you kind of, you know, you'll read this tomorrow and you'll laugh at yourself. You're like, yeah, this is the problem. Yeah. Like I'm kind of excited about this. But, you know, how do we have fun with these things? So that's why I said to you, like, therefore, like, how do we make it a plan? That's something you can do every day. And then how do we turn it to content? Make it fun. And then share it. And then other people are going to see that content and go, Hey, this is kind of spicy content. This is real. This is something that's coming from a real place with a real problem that Omar has. Even if you

never post it, right, you'll find that there's material in that. And an honesty about being vulnerable. Now one thing with personal branding that I learned from Christo, and this is really powerful. And he teaches this notion that you should wear and expose your vulnerabilities publicly. And he did this exercise where we wrote down a list of things we're really strong at. And on the other side, we wrote down an opposing list of all the things we're vulnerable at. Right. And for Chris, he was explaining this to me. He said, Dane, my biggest weakness is I'm an introvert. He's like, I'm such a painful introvert. Like I go on stage and I shake for 10 minutes. I meet someone who is cool and I get intimidated. And I get flustered. And my heart palpitates. And I my handshake and my brain goes foggy. And he's like, it's just happened my whole life. That's his great vulnerability. And he's he's embarrassed about it. He can't he feels like sometimes he can't control and daring because it's Christo. You know, Christo is the man. He's the man, right? So then he goes, well, what am I great at? He's like, I'm really loud. I wear loud outfits.

I have these loud ideas. I'm opinionated. But I'm cool once I warm up. So he essentially taught us that if you take a really cool strength and a really like embarrassing vulnerability and then you put those two things together, you create what he calls a two word brand. And his two word brand is like, hi guys, my name is Christo. So when he walks out on stage, the first thing you'll notice Christo says is, what's up guys? My name is Christo. And I'm a loud introvert. And people usually laugh. They're like, what do you mean a loud introvert? And he goes, can I get a hell yeah from what my introverts in the house and everyone laughs because no one puts a hand up, right? And he's like, that's my point, right? And then it's a joke. And it's a nice intro. And I think we need to take ourselves less seriously sometimes. And when we do these exercises, we're finding these vulnerabilities. And then we want to we want to hide them. We want to look perfect. We want to make sure we look cool. The coolest thing to do, I think is honestly exposing that you're a real human. If you look at all of our favorite TV characters, movie stars, they always have flaws. They always have vulnerabilities.

And we love them anyways. Why? Because it's way more relatable to look at a human who's a bit of a mess who's also winning and figuring it out kind of. Yeah. I kind of relate to that way more than I relate to messy or like this perfect like superstar. So for you, man, I think it's about like, how do you converge that body that feels a little bit like, oh, how do I put this out on stage and make content about it? I love that you bring up like characters and stories and shows and movies. I immediately thought of Walter White and Breaking Bad, where the whole time I was watching this series, this guy is getting darker and darker. But people still empathize with him because you feel like he's doing this all for his family. People hate his wife more even though he's a drug dealer killing people. I mean, like, his wife was like sensible trying to tell him like, you know, maybe he should stop killing people. And we're like, shut up. Yeah. Right. Back out there, do more violence. But then when you look at that perspective, it's like me sharing that, you know, I'm a bit prideful when people give me advice when they're less experienced. It's not as bad as being a murder. You know, like, it's fine. I'm going to survive sharing that with the world. So I love that.

We covered so much today, Dane. You've given so much great value and helped our audience here at the 100 on B.A. Show. We're all about being practical, taking action. What is one action you want our listeners to do as soon as they finish this episode? Ooh, one action. If there were one action each viewer of today's episode would be is what I'm about to go through right now, like, give yourself a minute to go through this metaphorical exercise. We do this right now. So I'm like, like, let's end viewers close your eyes. I want you to imagine you're in the cockpit of a Boeing 747. And you're looking around at this beautiful on a dashboard and all these dials. You've got this cool headset on and it's just you in the cockpit. And behind the door behind you is your whole family on board. And you know at the end of the runway, you're going to take off and you're going to fly to the destination of your dreams. Now, I want you to think about what is that place? Think about that place. It's three to five years from now. And when you arrive, who's there?

Where are you? How much money's in the bank? What are you doing? What are you wearing? Do you have a business? People working for you, like, just take a moment to, like, think about what that place is. Then you look at the wind shield on the dashboard of this Boeing 747 and the windows painted black. And you need to take off. And what happens is all the fear comes up. Well, I can't see the runway. Am I flying straight? I don't really know how to fly a plane yet. What happens if you crash and boom? What happens if we die? What happens if it doesn't work? Well, what happens if you don't take off? So every time you want to build something, it's like flying down that runway. It's only one way to do it. Foot to the gas, to the floor, and get as much speed as possible, and then yank that joystick back. There's only one way to get altitude and that speed. Speed in the right direction. Now, the metaphor here is as that plane starts to take off, what does the plane need to take off? And he's resistance. Yeah. He's wins. If you want to succeed in business, you need resistance. You need wins. You need headwind. You need things to push against you so you can create lift.

If nothing's pushing against you, not learning anything, you're not growing, you're not adapting, you're not twisting and contorting yourself to fit the market. You need resistance. And as the plane starts to take off, the windshield paint sets the strip back. You start to see a crack. Like, oh my god, there's clouds ahead. I don't know what clouds are. I don't know where I am compared to the ground, but I'm not running toward a tree line anymore. I'm at least looking at my goals. The hardest thing in business is to start. If you look at the equation of fuel economy on a flight, it's between 30 to 40% of the fuel is burned, getting the altitude. Oh. So most of fuel, by the time, just in the next time you're in an airport and you get on the plane, it gets altitude. Well, you just imagine 40% of the fuel tanks empty, gone. Just to get to altitude and you're still flying over the city. Yeah, you can fly from like Sydney to Dubai or New York to London on the remaining 60% of the fuel, almost an autopilot. And guess what happens off all the resistance lifts you up to altitude. There's no one near as much resistance and you can kind of cruise.

Occasionally you get turbulence, occasionally you think you're going to die. But every now and then you like close corrects and the cock comes back out and you can eat another maus bar or get another wine or some cheese and crackers. Business is like this. Like business is tough. The thing you know you need to be doing like stock, like all out war, like pedal to the metal and pull that joy stick because it's like it's you in the cockpit. No one else is flying the plane. Yeah. No one's on the radio trying to help you. Your family, depending on you, your kids, your wife, your spouse, your colleagues, your team members, they're all looking at you to go. I hope you doesn't crash the plane. Right. That's what it feels like to be an entrepreneur, a content creator, somebody creates something different, but you have to get comfortable being the pilot. You're not the copilot. You're not a passenger in this journey. You're the pilot. You're choosing a destination. Now what happens is if you fly 13 degrees in a wrong direction, course correct it. Yeah. Mid-flight. So many people spend their journey trying to get the right direction before they hit the runway. But the runway usually only puts them one direction and sometimes it's the wrong direction. Yeah. You have to look around. Yeah. You look around, but like take off. Like my business, my first

business was like a content creation agency, which I hated. I flew in the wrong direction. But like when I was at altitude, I was like, well, I got money in the bank. But those clients are like me. They just turned the plane in the other direction. And let's do branding instead. People just need to start. Like if I could let anyone do anything, it's just like just hit the gas, man. Like take the chance. I love it. Take the risk. In the West case, crash into the trees, get back out again. You're not going to die because it's a business. Yeah. Just content. It's not a real scenario. Yeah. And then get on another plane and do it again. Yeah. Life is way too short not to go for it. I love it. Yeah. I love that exercise. I got a couple other pieces of homework for everybody who's listening, watching number one, check out the agency podcast by Dane Walker. It's an amazing podcast. Got over 1.5 million subscribers on YouTube. Number two, download the exercise we did on the whiteboard with the impostor syndrome so that you can do that as well. And number three, you got to pick up Dane's book, the 90 day brand plan. I was a juices book about a year ago when I met you in Manly at the Dane Martells and and talkies event. And you did some of the exercises in

this book on on the whiteboard. And I thought there were like really practical and like, wow, this is so good to do even for branding a new product that you're coming out in your business. So awesome, easy read, give it an order on Amazon. Dane, it's been amazing to have you on the show. Thank you so much. I had a lot of fun. And thanks playing along with us with all the games. Oh, thank you, man. You're a ton of fun. I appreciate you so much too. Love you, man. Take care. I for now. If you found today's episode helpful and you want more practical business lessons to help start grow and scale your business, subscribe to the podcast. All you got to do is hit subscribe or follow on your favorite podcast app, the one that you're using right now. By hitting subscribe, you get our next episode automatically. It's absolutely free and it's a way for you to commit to growing your business. I'll check you in the next episode. Our tax exempt status works online and in store and with our tight budgets,

they have everything we need at prices I love. Expense management tools help them stay on top of what he's spending. I keep track of hundreds of things every day. Jenny, get out of there. Thankfully, Walmart Business lets me keep track of all our expenses in one place. Aaron, don't need that. Michael, uh. It's Walmart. Build for your business. Who knew? Eligible organizations. Additional terms apply.

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