Property Hub - Investment Insights & Inspiration - Get Invested: How to unlock the power of your personal brand with Andrew Montesi

Episode Date: July 27, 2019

What is your personal brand? Why should you care about it? Why does it matter? Where do you start and how do you build your personal brand? Well, this is where today’s special guest Andrew Montesi comes in. You see, over the years I’ve learned the hard way that it doesn’t matter how good you are at what you do, if the right people don’t know about it and they don’t know, like and trust you then you are always going to do it tough. This is particularly relevant in today’s world of constant noise where everyone with an iPhone is a budding journalist, DJ, photographer, movie star and influencer and the old 15 minutes of fame has been reduced to 15 seconds as it is drowned out in constant ad nauseum noise. So a couple of years ago we delved into the personal branding space and had involvement with a lot of so called media expert propeller heads who promised the world but delivered very little – until we were lucky enough to meet today’s guest who has been instrumental in profiling and positioning me personally and our KNOW:HOW business as thought leaders in the property finance industry nationally – and the benefits have been amazing and life changing. Andrew Montesi calls himself a full stack marketer but I call him the all things marketing orchestra leader or conductor - I just hum a few bars of a marketing song I am thinking of and he turns this into a full blown symphony, assembles all of the best available musicians and instruments and makes sure they’re performing our song in front of a large interested crowd who wants to hear it. Andrew, or Monty as he is best known, answers all of your personal branding questions today, he opens your ears to the critical importance of your personal brand and motivates you on how to get started or to be doing it a lot more effectively. Andrew is managing director at Apiro Consulting and head of marketing at PickStar. Andrew's book recommendation: Traction by Gabriel Weinberg, The End of Jobs by Taylor Pearson and Ekklesia by Ed Silvoso Get Invested is the podcast dedicated to time poor professionals who want to work less and live more. Join Bushy Martin, one of Australia’s top 10 property specialists, as he and his influential guests share know-how on the ways investing in property can unlock the life you always dreamed about and secure your financial future. Remember to subscribe on your favourite podcast player, and if you're enjoying the show please leave us a review. Find out more about Get Invested here https://bushymartin.com.au/get-invested-podcast/  Want to connect with Bushy? Get in touch here https://bushymartin.com.au/contact/  This show is produced by Apiro Media - http://apiropodcasts.com  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

It's really challenging for people on a personal level, particularly if they're not necessarily comfortable with talking about what they do publicly. They're used to just churning out their work and being great at what they do and being able to take them on a journey where you're reassuring them that they're not being a tosser, talking themselves up. But they can actually build their brand in a credible way that is going to support what they do, but also bring them those wonderful personal development skills and opportunities that they would have never otherwise had access to. Welcome to the Get Invested podcast, where we share great conversations with experts from all walks of life to uncover their secret know-how on where they invest their time, their skills, and their money, and the benefits that this has created. you see the truth is that everyone invests every minute every day we're investing our time our skills our energy and our money in something some of us are investing consciously some unconsciously sometimes for good sometimes for bad sometimes for no impact get invested will help you to start living by design not by default i'm going to help you to make it happen not let

it happen. You'll hear the top tips on how you can live with conscious intent so that you can live more, work less and leave a living legacy by investing now. Listen to the show to discover the top tips on how to get started, make the most of your investment journey and ultimately to be living your dream, not someone else's. More episodes can be found on iTunes or at bushymartin.com.au forward slash get invested. Thanks for listening and now let's get invested. hey freedom fighters do you feel safe and secure or frustrated and fearful with your work or business are you indispensable are you the best person perceived as being able to bring it all together and make a difference the person with a knack for finding a new answer a new connection

or a new way of getting things done and even if you are that person do the right people know it and believe it. If not, then listen up, because today's special Bush bonus episode will be mission critical to your future success in our rapidly changing world. You see, we're now living in a time when being merely good, merely obedient and merely reliable is no longer good enough. In an increasingly time poor world of infinite choice, where everything is perceived as being the same. People will choose the cheapest. This is a never-ending negative spiral on the road to ruin and oblivion. In our hyper-competitive world that's caught in this never-ending race to the bottom, everything is forced to turn us into replaceable cogs in a vast machine.

And the easier you are to replace, the less you'll get paid. Until they don't need you any more at all, because they can get you elsewhere cheaper and easier. If what you're doing can be optimised for productivity by being totally planned, controlled and measured within an inch of its life, then you're interchangeable and replaceable by the next best cheaper option. If you're known as one of many, you'll become a non-choice and your income and your working days are limited. you're likely living on death row with an unknown but approaching execution date without even

knowing it in this new world of work we're left with only two survival thrive choices win short term with a stay of execution by being more ordinary more standard and cheaper or win by being faster more remarkable and more connected you may be able to survive for a while being the cheapest, but you earn your place in the world with humanity and leadership because we all crave the unique, the remarkable, and that human connection. In this new world at work, you need to become known as the best person available that can solve someone's meaningful problem, a problem that you truly care about and can solve remarkably. As Seth Godin summed up in his book, Linchpin

The future belongs to celebrity chefs Not to cooks or bottle washers We need to be known as the constant creators of new solutions Not following someone else's recipe To survive and thrive in a rapidly changing global future You need to become an artist who creates gifts, connections and humanity an indispensable linchpin and a troubleshooter who's seen as the best person to meet these needs

and to solve meaningful problems. You see, all of us value insight, creativity and engagement. If the right people recognise you as one of the best to deliver this, then your future is safe, secure and potentially prosperous. So how do you protect yourself and achieve this? Well, you know what I'm about to say. You need to get invested and you need to do it now. And the first and most important step is to build your personal brand.

You need to become famous to the few that matter to your future. And the good news is that there's never been a better time or opportunity for you to make this happen. So take a quick minute now and Google yourself. Do you come up? If there are items that mention you, do they show you what you want the world to see? And how do people perceive you offline? Do they connect you and your values with what you do and the value that you create? Now for me, branding has become a somewhat overused term that means different things

to different people and often leaves me feeling confused and not sure what to do about it. So what's your personal brand? Why should you care about it? And why does it matter? Where do you start and how do you build your personal brand? Well, this is where today's special guest, Andrew Montessi, comes in. You see, over the years, I've learned the hard way that it doesn't matter how good you are at what you do, if the right people don't know about it and they don't know, like, and trust you,

then you're always going to do it tough. And this is particularly relevant in today's world of constant noise where everyone with an iPhone is a budding journalist, a DJ, a photographer, a movie star, an influencer. And the old 15 minutes of fame has been reduced to about 15 seconds as it's drowned out in the absolute constant ad nauseum of noise. So a couple of years ago we delved into the personal branding space and we had some involvement with a lot of so-called media expert propeller heads

super-promised the world but absolutely delivered pretty much silch. Until we were lucky enough to meet today's guest, who's been absolutely instrumental in profiling and positioning me personally and our know-how business as thought leaders in the property finance industry nationally. And the benefits have been amazing and life-changing. Andrew Montessi calls himself a full-stack marketer, but I'd like to call him the all-things marketing orchestra leader. I just hum a few bars of a marketing message I'm thinking of, and he turns this into a

full-blown symphony, assembles all the best available musicians and instruments, and makes sure they're performing our song in front of a large, interested crowd who wants to hear it. Andrew, or Monty as he's best known, answers all of your personal branding questions today, he opens your ears to the critical importance of your personal brand, and he motivates you on how to get started or to be doing it a lot more effectively. So welcome to this special Get Invested Personal Branding Bonus Ode with Andrew Montessi. Friendly Fighters, it's Bushy Martin back again.

And today we're talking to the man who's solely responsible for taking me from zero to hero in a very short space of time in relation to people knowing who I am, what I do and what we stand for. So great to have a chat, Andrew Melantesi. Great to be here, Bushy. I'm excited. Yeah, me too, mate. You're the man who's been my shadow really for the last 18 months or so in relation to really just positioning us in relation to what we're doing both personally and as a business. So it's a really great opportunity to start shining the spotlight on you mate so I'm going to make you dance a bit today buddy. I'm looking forward to it as we were

saying off mic mate it's a little bit uncomfortable for me actually talking about myself and what I do rather than forcing people like yourself to talk about what you do. Well you're going to get a taste of your own medicine today mate so get ready for it. Yeah mate for those who don't know who you are and what you do can you just give us a bit of a rundown so that people are clear on where you're and where you're heading please buddy yeah sure i mean this is a good one because my wife constantly asks me this question what do you actually do but very broadly i describe myself as a full stack marketer and media producer which means i'm a jack of all trades hopefully master of some and i so i have my own marketing business which is apiro consulting and i've also spent the last

few years working full-time in startups as well so one that i'm with at the moment is pickstar which is a marketplace to book sports stars for commercial opportunities so that is involves me doing everything from the broader strategy for businesses and the personal brands within the business through to the nuts and bolts of setting up facebook campaigns doing podcasts creating content and everything in between so hence the the jack of all trades line yeah and the the stack marketer i like that too mate i'm envisaging pancakes but uh the uh tell you what it's a really broad area that you work in and you use you've used the word marketing and you use work branding and it sort of means different things to different people what what parts of that whole uh equation

and there's a lot in it don't you do rather than what you do do because that might just help the listeners understand where you fit into the equation, mate. Good question. So there's a few things that I don't specifically do and that is graphic design, video editing. But having said that, it's almost hard to explain but I'm very experienced in those areas but not in a hands-on way.

So I'll work closely with designers. I'll work closely with video producers. I'll work closely with audio engineers, but it's more on a creative and strategic process and a system, more so than actually doing the nuts and bolts itself. But my background is journalism, so I'll create content in terms of writing. I'll conduct interviews and produce the content,

but not necessarily the nuts and bolts. But as far as what else I don't do, mate, Like, to be honest, there's not much. It's been one of those things where over the last 10 years I've forced myself to learn things as I've needed to solve problems both for myself but also the businesses that I've worked within to be able to tick boxes from a marketing perspective when we haven't necessarily had the budget to go and engage other experts.

So that's basically how I started doing all these different things in marketing, brand and media. That's probably why you've been so good for us because we're definitely on the small business side with a small team of sort of nine of us. And how I often describe you to others when I'm singing your praises, mate, is to say that I see you as a marketing and branding orchestra leader where you understand what song we're trying to sing.

So I'll just hum you a few bars, you'll turn those few bars into a masterpiece and then assemble all the right musicians and instruments to actually perform that in front of a massive crowd. That's sort of the way I try to liken it because you have this uncanny ability to say, right, okay, I understand what you're trying to do. I'll get the best people around me to make sure that once we put it together that we've got a sensational result that's on message and hitting the right people with the right stuff at the right time.

Would that be a fair summary, do you think? Yeah, it's a nice way of putting it. There's definitely been a growing need. It's almost like marketing project management in the same way that you would approach a property development in that you don't necessarily need all of the staff and the experts full-time, but you need the ability to bring the right team in

for the right job at the right time and I guess working in this business so broadly has enabled me to build a really good network of awesome experts in their field so that if it's a web development project I can pull in the best developer at the best price bring in a designer I might do some of the copy as well as the strategy and bring in the best people to do it and that way that people like yourself and other clients who I've built up some trust with back me in to manage the project but know that I'm going to bring in the right people who I've worked with for 10, 15 years

who I know will get the job done at the best price effectively. And that's always the challenge because when you're not in marketing, like there's a million different web developers out there. there's 50 million graphic designers out there like like where do you start yeah and um and i think that's where where i can offer that value absolutely and i'm just talking exactly around that i often say look we've rubbed shoulders with a thousand propeller heads in this space over the last five years i reckon and it wasn't until meeting you that we finally had a chance to work with someone who walks the talk and actually delivers what you say you're

and deliver because there's lots of promise in this whole space around what people are going to do for you and they'll charge big dollars for very little outcome. And it's been a pleasure to finally come across someone like yourself who really does understand it, who can position the message that is relevant to what we're trying to say and really is getting the sort of engagement and connection with the right people

so we're becoming sort of famous to a few rather than famous to many. And I think that's been the real key for us. But if I dig into your why, mate, why do you do what you do? It's a really good question. I mean, there's a number of things. So I'm a little bit addicted to seeing people and businesses grow in whatever way that they want to.

So whether that's on a relational level or whether that's on a commercial level, I get a real kick out of seeing people achieve those goals that they've set themselves. And I guess the other thing is part of that is I get energised by it and I also get energised by the hard things. So we'll probably talk about it a bit later, but I've got a fair background in start-ups and starting with not much from a marketing perspective. So I get a lot of satisfaction from starting with almost a bit of a clean slate and even if there's not much of a budget and creating something out of nothing.

So that really motivates me. But then seeing how that affects people on a personal level and how they grow and develop as people, like particularly in this marketing space it's there's the commercial aspect but it's really challenging for people on a personal level particularly if they're not necessarily comfortable with talking about what they do publicly um yeah they're used to just churning out their work and being great at what they do and and being able to take them on a journey where you're reassuring them that they're not being a tosser talking themselves up but they can actually

build their brand in a credible way yeah that is going to support what they do and but also bring them those wonderful personal development skills and opportunities that they would have never never otherwise um had access to yeah that's what i really love about it yeah it's a really good call i haven't actually thought about that but it's the the person you become on the way to communicating a message that i think is something that none of us think enough about and i can say firsthand for myself with the opportunities that you've helped create for us in the media space and in a whole bunch of areas what it forces you to do is really think hard about what you really do believe and get really good at communicating that in a way that is both authentic but also

people can relate and connect to and it's not until you actually step up onto that plate that you challenge yourself really to start doing those things. And I think the really good news for me, talking personally with what you've helped us with, is I've become a much better person both professionally and personally as a result of being forced to get really clear around what I believe and how I communicate that. And that's a bit of an unsung part of the whole branding,

marketing exercise that doesn't get much focus. yeah and i think i mean you're a great example of it and and same with a couple of others that i've worked with over the years who've just been really open and that's that's the key is starting out on this journey you're not going to know what's ahead it might be new territory that you're entering in but going all right i'm just going to be open to it and and i might be challenged it might be i might be forced to do things that i'm not comfortable with initially but I'm going to trust the experts that I'm working with and I'm going to trust that I know what I'm talking about

and I'm going to actually trust myself in terms of as a subject matter expert. And that's the key. Like a lot of the... I'll be very lucky that the people that I tend to work with walk the talk and where I get concerned as a marketer is if someone is asking me to sell something

that's not really them. so someone who wants to be perceived as an expert but they don't back it up with a credible career with the qualifications with the expertise and the experience people like yourself you've you've got the runs on the board and that for me is the perfect foundation to then be open and actually look at launching and building a brand around it well you picked up on something really good there have you come across people who after having a having a chat and getting to understand where they're at they're going there's not a fit here what they're looking to promote themselves as and where they're at don't work out how have you um maneuvered around that mate yeah it's it's

challenging i've had a few but invariably it doesn't go anywhere um even though they might have the intention of doing all these great things and building building a brand if it if it isn't solid then they're going to find it very hard to give me the fundamentals that i need to be able to build their brand so a lot of what i do particularly in the thought leadership kind of expertise is use content so if i'm gonna put you up bushy to talk for an hour about what you do in property well is you could keep talking and talking and talking and talking because you're not like the back of your hand but if someone else who might have been part of one property development but doesn't really get it they want to be perceived as an expert in that space and i'm going to put

them up for an hour interview on a podcast well they're going to get exposed or they're not going to they're going to be aware of the risk and they're not going to put themselves up for it yeah so before you know it they end up going oh maybe i shouldn't do this or they literally get exposed and that's the risk yeah of course yeah we'll come back to that mate but uh yeah what i'm keen to do now though is get you to walk us through your uh journey so far i know people keep uh hating hearing the word journey but it is what it is mate as far as i we all all are on a journey and i'd love you to sort uh weave us through from as early as you like what you've done and why and where you've invested your time energy and skills where that got you to

and what then motivated you and what was the thinking on that progression to get you to where you are now yeah sure so if I go back to my probably my high school days always into my sport good at sport had aspirations like a secondary to playing professional sport I wanted to be in sport so the goal was I'd love to be in sports journalism like okay and that was pretty early that was that was really early on yeah that was that was in high school but then like a lot of people in year 12 I select selected subjects poorly so I did okay but you know it works with scores being bumped up pulled down you know just choosing a really bad mix and I did okay but at the time the the tertiary entrance rank for journalism was just ridiculous it was like

96 or 97 which wow it's not even close to that now but um i couldn't get in so what i thought was i was i'd study social sciences and then jump across to to journalism afterwards anyway i kind of bludged first year uni social sciences and then through a connection through my dad um i got word that the Crows were offering, the Adelaide Crows, the AFL club, were offering a traineeship. Yep. And I thought, oh, yeah, I might give that a go for a year and see how we go.

And it was part-time in media and part-time in junior development. OK. So I ended up parking up the uni stuff and jumping across to the Crows, which was an amazing experience in some ways. And, to be honest, bloody terrible in others. Like, I was running... Yeah, I'm interested there. So what's the good and the bad and the ugly of that experience, mate?

Tell us about it. So I have a few repressed memories, so this might be part of a healing process for me. So the Crows, they still do it. They run these junior development programs where you go out to schools every day and run sessions and it's good content for the kids and the kids love it, but ultimately it's also about getting the Crows brand

out there in the market. it yeah but so what i used to have to do so it was former crow shane ellen he was the he's now a copper but he was um he'd host it at the schools and i'd have to jump in the crow suit in the mascot suit and do a little jig and a bit of a dance and it's like oh you know this is all right i'll just tough it out it's it's just the odd you know every morning or whatever and it's just an hour i'll be fine but then it was an absolute nightmare like some some of the bigger schools there's a thousand kids and we're doing three sessions and i'm waiting for my cue to come out and do my dance and i'm stuffed in a storeroom in a school and it's like 35 degrees i'm sweating in

this giant crow's head it stinks and literally i remember one time i was lying on my back looking up at the giant beak around my head and i said to myself is this what i have become i am a mascot so that was the nightmare but what what kept me interested was i was also doing a little bit in the media department so i was working with maddie robber and another crow's legend who like like back in the day there's a handful of staff and they just kind of got handed these departments and Matty Robbins, a great bloke, and at the time he was looking after media and he knew I was interested, so he'd let me write for the website and things like that.

And that was what was keeping me interested. And then I got to a point, to cut a long story short, where The Crows brought on a former journo, a guy by the name of David Bertenshaw, who was at The Advertiser for 10 years. He spent another five years as the editor at the Kalgoorlie Minor in WA very experienced journo yeah and then he somehow talked the guys into letting me move into his department full-time as his assistant and he effectively put me through a cadetship so once we were he he was awesome like he he basically said well what do you want

to do and I said I'd love to get into journalism like that's what I always ultimately wanted to do so we said all right well let's let's do it and he trained up junior journos before so for a year like he just taught me how to write taught me how to communicate he taught me about digital like for a relatively senior guy he was he was the uh he saw facebook coming before anyone else did he saw all the other social platforms he was really progressive with his web and tech and and so here's one guy i credit massively for putting me on the path that i ended up going down yeah awesome yeah so he taught me that mate and then from there i guess one of the big things about being at the crows and those type of organizations is the networks so as much as i

i complain about the crow suit the caliber of people that i was dealing with yeah was brilliant for a 19-year-old kid at the time. I bet. You know, I had mates at kind of continuing to bludge at uni and I was full-time connecting with pretty high-level people and learning from pretty amazing people. I've been. Just jumping in there, mate, for those listeners

that aren't Adelaide-centric or perhaps OS, the Adelaide Crows at the time that you were involved were the centre of the universe as far as Adelaide's concerned. Everyone worshipped the Adelaide Crows, the players. They were demigods in their own right. So all roads tended to lead back to the Crows. So swimming in that environment would have been absolutely sensational from a whole bunch of perspectives, I would have thought.

Yeah, it was a wild ride for my first full-time job. So it was a pretty amazing experience. But the doors that opened up. So what happened from here is I got basically trained up internally as a journo and then from there I made relationships with other guys in media so working in the media department at the Crows I was dealing with the sports journos every day helping coordinate interviews and press and PR getting to know the guys really well and then an opportunity came up at Channel 9 and the guys said oh I wonder if you'd be a fit for that and I was

I was like, oh, jeez, I'd love a crack. But, you know, I didn't have a degree. It was very unconventional. But, again, to cut a long story short, I managed to somehow talk my way into Channel 9, and it was a first. I'm pretty sure even to this day, I was probably the only sport reporter or journo

that didn't have a journalism degree, but I'd received on-the-job training and through networks. And, obviously, I had to have the skills and the temperament to back it up but I was lucky enough to be given a crack which was at the time pretty high risk for the news director to to put me on because it wasn't conventional at all no well I guess the what I'm reading there mate and I think one of the take-homes here for those listening in is you know sort of a sub theme what we're talking about that today and that is you can be really good at what you do whether you've got the qualification or not which you clearly were given the guidance

you had. But the added benefit there, I think, reading between the lines, is your relationship building skills, which is, if we're talking about marketing and branding, for me, it's always been about building relationship. And clearly, given who you are and where you are, yes, you've got some hands-on experience, but given your exposure to the right people, you've still got to have the relationship building skills to make that happen mate would that be a fair assessment yeah that's it's a huge factor um and to to learn that at a really young age was was key as i said full-time 19 when most of my other mates at uni kind of kicking around with a lot of others at their own level to be able to go into an organization like the crows and and and see how the the guys there

the senior managers through to the journos and everyone else involved in that organisation, see how they operate, understand that networks are absolutely key. And, you know, we'll talk about this as well later, but those authentic relationships and not being the cheesy exchange of business cards and say, well, that's me networking, but actually building legitimate, true relationships and that kind of really underpinning things

as a foundation for career development and career success was absolutely key. Yeah, I 100% agree. Great. So you jumped on board with Channel 9? Where did that lead to? Yeah, so Channel 9 was an amazing experience. As I said, it was an interesting call by the news director

and there was a few people looking at me. I remember when I first walked in the newsroom like, mate you haven't done your time you haven't you haven't earned this but when i explained the crow suit story and my sufferings then they realized actually he has done it pretty hard he's he probably has earned it but again that was uh you know a very thinly resourced newsroom at the time owned by win who was spending nothing and we were the underdogs and that was part of the reason why i got the opportunity as well i think i was cheap labor and that's cool like that you got to take those opportunities when they when they come and understand it's not all about money

yeah but um i was thrown into it day one i remember tony agar the news director said oh um yeah mate well you know i know you're green so we're going to put you through some training anyway day one they said oh we're short staffed you're gonna have to do this story down at port adelaide meanwhile i've been working at the crows for four years the next day i'm at i'm interviewing port coach mark williams so this is just scary but from that point on it was pretty much on the job training again and um you know there's that common thread that that seems to come through with me that i'm constantly training on the job and constantly thrown into stuff and it and it becomes sink or sink or swim and and luckily i managed to swim um again from a personal development

level working in media um with brutal deadlines every night you've got to deliver your yarn at the end of the night and uh you know still editing like you might spend three hours out picking up interviews and footage and the editor is still finishing off the tail end of your news story as they're putting it to air, that's when you learn to work under pressure. Mate, that sort of ability to throw yourself in the deep end, is that something that has always been there?

Is this something that if you go way back when to when you were knee-high to grasshopper, Were you always fairly adventurous in that regard or it's just circumstantial and you've just gone, right, I'm just going to have a crack. I don't have a choice. I'm just going to give this a go. Yeah, look, I think a lot of that comes from my dad, I think. So my dad's always been a small business owner, quite entrepreneurial and always pushing me to have a crack and that was his big thing. so you know my sister and I we were he made sure we we were getting part-time jobs at 14 15 on top

of sport and school and things like that because that really underpinned um his life and what was really important in terms of hard work and um and really having a crack and putting your best foot forward and being resilient yeah and not like that was a big thing for him like he would never let like dad never lets us fold and go oh it's all a bit hard dad oh geez i just you know what i just can't be bothered like like that was yeah gee i learned pretty quickly that that was not acceptable in our house and i think that that meant that kind of really set me up for the next phase of life in terms of just being resilient and going well you know how can i actually solve this problem and and i know that even to this day that's how dad operates so dad dad still runs

his own signage and visual communications company yeah and and he he jokes but i know that he's half serious and he gets a client ask for something and his first answer is yeah we can do it even if he even if he's not 100 sure to be honest and then he works it out and he solves a problem so yeah there's a little bit of that in me as well i think yeah but there's no better way to to learn and increase your skill and challenge yourself and to tackle something that's just beyond your reach. You know, if we're always sitting in the comfort zone, then there's no need to grow.

So, no, that's awesome, mate. So that would have been a baptism in the fire. I can't even imagine how much pressure that would have been just because the deadlines, particularly these days, a lot of stories have to produce really quick. it would have really sharpened the sword, I'd imagine. Yeah, and it's even worse now. I've still got a lot of mates who are journos and reporters

and I used to have to worry about the 6pm bulletin and now because of the consolidation of newsrooms and the fact that news is really cheap TV to produce, they're churning out, you know, there's the breakfast shows, there's the 11am news, there's the 4pm news, there's a 5 p.m bulletin there's a 6 p.m bulletin some guys have 7 p.m bulletins and they're they're constantly on the road and producing and publishing content on the fly like it's a crazy world it would be because in the old days you'd the morning news wasn't much different to the

evening news that they'd almost rerun the same stories but five five seconds is too long these days it's everything's got to be fresh and new with a different angle on it so it must put And the news cycle is so brutal because of social media. So they're churning out all this content, but then someone tweets some breaking news and they've got to go again and again and again. So you're talking about mainstream media trying to keep up with what's happening on social media.

It becomes pretty insane. And I think it's pretty unsustainable, to be honest, and that's why we're seeing the quality of content diminish. yeah but anyway that's a whole nother podcast yes it is a pod yeah i agree with you matt i agree all right we'll see uh channel nine uh yeah then it was the law firm yes now there's a there's a massive jump i'd love to drill into the insights as to the decision you made to go from channel nine to a law firm was it the perception of oh my god i need some peace and tranquility how hard can a law firm be compared to what i've been doing or was it a lot more to it than that

No, I think there was more to it than that. I mean, I've always been passionate about business and looking at content from a more holistic perspective. Like, I love commercial content. I love content that delivers business outcomes. So I was always interested in that. And even when I was at Channel 9, I used to tinker and do a little bit of PR advisory and some...

Like, I'm always tinkering and always learning. So I had that going while I was at Nine. And then I was thinking about the next phase. You know, I'd never, unlike a lot of journos, I never set out to be a newsreader on the desk. I didn't have aspirations of, you know, moving to one of the bigger stations or going to Nine at Sydney. So I was thinking,

I was always interested in getting back into more of the business side. I just wasn't really sure. And then this opportunity through a connection came up at this law firm. tgb here in adelaide biggest plaintiff law firm in sa and yeah it the the dance took about nine months in terms of working out whether it was the right fit for me and whether i was the right fit for them and it was a risk for both of us because law firms are quite conservative conservative and they're going like this guy's a sport reporter like like why would we bring a sport reporter here and i'm going i'm a sport reporter like why would i go to a law firm yeah and people say they

get in your ear and there's this thing um around ego with the jobs that i've had you know i worked at the crows and people go oh you know even though you're in the crow suit and you're over it and it's crappy like oh but you're working at the crows so like you live in the dream and then same thing at channel nine oh but you're a sport reporter and you're living the dream and there were great aspects but there was also a lot of limitations yeah so i learned pretty quickly to put the ego aside in terms of not putting my identity into those roles so ultimately i just weighed it up and i got to know some of the leaders at the law firm i really liked them and i started to talk about some of my thinking in terms of using content for brand and using

content to um create commercial outcomes and we both started to get pretty excited about what we could do and and and that's how i ended up at the law firm yeah i was really again i i see yourself diving in deep to uh uh you know you've gone from one extreme to the other uh with with law firms who you know there's still this um perception of uh advertising is a dirty word uh i still see it in lawyers now who are you know it's all about reputation and the the guys who you know the guys who prostitute themselves by advertising on the tv and the the uh the whole um uh element around that American side of the legal exercise was really poo-pooed by the fraternity here.

So it would have been quite challenging, I would imagine, in the start of that exercise. Yeah, it was really challenging, but it was a great challenge. Like I said, I love that idea of starting from that point where it's almost a bit of a clean slate and you've got to push against some old mindsets. Luckily, for the most part, the partnership was quite progressive but what it took was for me to get runs on the board early.

So we're in this stage of I've just started and we're feeling each other out and there was an opportunity where... So the firm was interested at the time in class action work. Okay. So, you know, where there's a major issue and multiple people are affected and there's a commercial loss for groups of people.

It's a big market for some law firms if you can do it and in the in tgb's history they'd missed out on that type of work but there was this opportunity that came up and it was it was breaking news and they all all the partners gathered around and said well how do we get a piece of this and i said oh well why don't you give me a crack i'll um i'll do a press release i'll create some content on the website and and drive a bit of activity via social like let's see how we go and they said yep no problems anyway that day we had a full press conference with every every news outlet in the state at our office wow it was it was on leading every news and the phones were going nuts like to the

point where the the firm just was not prepared to cope with it and then it it created this cycle of ongoing media and it was great for the brand and there were genuine leads coming in and that's when straight away they're like okay i think we can work with this guy and then to their credit particularly maury bales who's the managing partner very progressive leader um he really backed me in and said well i think you've proven that you can do this stuff so what else can we do and that's really how the ball started rolling and and i was able to present ideas and um they were able to just go well okay we'll give him a go and then that would work and then then i was able to I was able to pitch a bigger project or something a bit more ambitious for the law firm

and bit by bit we were able to take on more as I built trust yeah yeah awesome mate okay so you're there for for a stretch and then was that the prior to the move then into what you're doing now or is there another couple of them steps on the yeah so I was so I was at the the law firm for about four years, heading up their PR and marketing full-time. And then at the same time, I managed to get involved in a youth mental health start-up. Okay. So through a mutual friend, a guy came to me and said,

look, I've just launched this app. It's basically a social network for young people to talk about their struggles. And he goes, it's just, it's blown up in a good way. He goes, I've just all of a sudden got 15,000 users and I don't know how to handle it and what do we do and between ended up being three of us as co-founders and we went on this wild ride with TalkLife.

I think it's now got well over a million downloads, this app. Wow. And it's based out of the UK and it's absolutely flying but that was another wild ride that I juggled with the full-time role so I would take, you know, working nights and early mornings with the guys as this thing was just growing and growing and growing and then um yeah so growing that startup learning about startups while working full-time in the business and for a while there they were really complimentary because i was learning so much working in the startup that i

was able to apply it with the law firm from a marketing perspective and yes um it was it was really interesting uh but it was like the startup was just nuts like it was like as i said off the top i don't have a degree but i would say to anyone if you want to learn about business get involved in an early stage startup and you will learn so much in a short period of time like it's yeah i felt i joked that like within the space of 12 months i felt like i'd done two business degrees i bet like the learning was insane yeah absolutely and it's it is really the the case that uh you know i think quite often uh the true disruptors aren't the ones who've gone down the traditional education course because it tends to put your thinking in a box

and you start to think like everyone else whereas if you've come into an area whether it be a new business or a new industry or whatever it might be and you're not tainted with that baggage you're going to ask questions that the average person won't ask and therefore potentially open up solutions and opportunities that would never have been thought of yeah absolutely mate and particularly in the startup space where so this would have been you know not that long ago when we got this was 2013 but in adelaide in particular the startup ecosystem was very small yeah you know borderline non-existent and talk life was an instant global startup so no users in adelaide all of the users in the states and in europe wow and we needed

capital and i had no idea at the time about anything to do with raising investment apart from seeing headlines about the crazy numbers that silicon valley startups were doing yeah and And I remember talking to Jamie and Jacob, the guys I was working with, we need capital, what are we going to do? And then I saw an ad for Europe's biggest tech conference web summit in Dublin and I read that there was heaps of investors there and you could pitch to investors. So with our own money, we go, well, let's go to Dublin.

So we went to Dublin and we're like three sales guys. And it's funny, actually, from a property perspective, the the main founder of talk life is a former real estate agent and we were just hustling trying like hustling investment no clarity on the business model remember the first investor asked me for a pitch deck i had no idea what a pitch deck was so again that was another piece of learning like i've produced hundreds of pitch decks from that point yeah and and understanding like how to market not only to consumers but to investors and how to articulate your elevator pitch for a business and to to sell the offering not only to yet customers but to

people who might want to buy into the business it's a completely different skill set for me again totally love it yeah fascinating awesome learnings mate sensational learnings and just as we're threading threading this through the the collection of skills that you're putting together and therefore i can see very clearly why you've now got this ability to to take pretty much anything go okay i know how we're going to solve that it mightn't be all me but i'll know who to introduce i know what questions do i ask and i'll know i can see how we need to get them involved when to get the outcome so uh that and that's a rare skill set in anyone's language mate it's all about problem solving though isn't it i mean that's what

whether you're in marketing or other aspects of business or another career life is about problem solving and when you're in a startup and your startup has no funding like you have to solve those problems yourself yeah so you find a way you got to learn so it's it's wild but it's the it's the best career development experience you could ever do yeah absolutely mate but uh well i reckon you've given us a pretty good picture as to where that's landed you with the pro and and what you continue to do with Pickstar and the sports influencer space. But I'm very keen now, for my own benefit and for the benefit of those listening in, just to drill into the importance of personal branding.

Because increasingly, in this world of noise that we're all drowning in, And it's really evident to me and a lot of others that just being good at what you do, it won't cut it. It never has really, but increasingly so, it's going to become important to be able to position yourselves with the right people at the right time to be top of mind if you're going to be successful in whatever endeavour you're doing. So can we start to drill into personal branding? And let's start by defining what personal branding is so that we're all on the same page with that, if you don't mind. Please, mate. Yeah, sure. I mean, very simply, your personal brand is what you are known for, sometimes for better or worse.

But, you know, so the key elements of that personal brand, you know, it can be a collection of things including your purpose, values, your story, which is a massive one, skills, experiences, your credibility. and to some extent your network, and then you pull that together and that becomes what you're known for, and it should be authentically who you are, not what you do. Yeah, let's link a couple of those because you sort of emphasised story. Why do you think the story is so important to that? Because that's how people engage, particularly on a personal level and even on a brand and commercial level,

but people get caught up in the story. People can connect with you on a personal level depending on your story and how you articulate it. People buy into you. They want to invest in you whether it's on a personal or financial level if they connect with your story. And your story is often what builds your credibility and authority to yeah to kind of be who you are out there in a marketing sense or

or as as a brand it's the story is just and I think again with my journal background and as a content creator the story really underpins my work as a marketer otherwise you know everyone can can churn out academic content but it's the story that really connects with people and that's where true impact happens and as as you know mate like when you when you hear someone's story you can it paints a picture in your mind and and it makes you feel emotion and that's the that's a big thing is that everything these days in marketing is emotion driven yeah so you look at social media facebook's algorithm is optimized based on emotion so if you want to get cut through you've got to make people happy sad angry whatever you have to make them feel something the worst

thing you can do is to not make them feel anything and that's really influenced everything in marketing and it's the story that can help you do that yeah gotcha that makes complete sense and i guess that links pretty strongly to that authenticity and the and the increasing vulnerability that we're seeing yeah i think in in people being much more prepared to express that emotion and and not be a superhero uh 100 of the time is that a fair read absolutely um as you say authenticity is key like people if you're putting out a story that is um this perfect life and you've you've always got it right people are going to call bullshit straight away well we know that's not true we know that this this guy's full of it and and if you share your struggles and and

your challenges that's where you build connection with people because they go you know what bushy was talking about um you know his first marriage struggles you know what i've had relationship troubles as well like i now feel that i can connect with bushy and he's relatable and and it feels like a little thing but that is a difference between you know someone choosing to work with you and your business versus a competitor yeah yeah you're real it makes you real there's no doubt about it yeah because i guess i'm attracted to the same thing it's like okay well this this guy's had some challenges and i can relate to that so yeah it's going to be worth having a chat to you yeah love that so if we look at personal brand because it's talked about a lot

these days who should care about it mate absolutely everyone okay yeah what is so well because personal brand it's so like if i look at it from a business owner perspective so people do business with people not companies so you need always whenever i work with a business i look at the people that are fronting the business the founder the director the senior manager because they're the one that will engage the customers they're the ones that will build that connection people just want to do business with other people like them they don't it's like even when I work in social media it can be really hard to get traction with a brand profile on social media but if the instead of using know-how for example is as the brand and driving the

the bushy martin brand well it becomes something completely different yeah the personal factor is so much more important and then from a career progression perspective so personal brand is the key driver of you know getting the promotion showcasing to you know senior managers who are the ones in you know employing for future bigger roles that that you have the capacity to take the next step personal brand is massive if you're looking to move on from the existing organization that you're with and go to a new bigger organization with a bigger role yeah and then just as i said off the top mate when we were talking about it there's the personal growth aspect as well yeah so whether you're motivated by business or career or not your personal brand determines your level

of influence it determines your sphere of influence it uh it becomes the building blocks of your personal network as well and the and the favor and the opportunities that you get and it sounds it can sound a bit tacky but that that's that's a reality like if you've got a personal brand that that really resonates with people whether it's the guy down the road or or your manager you'll see more favor and opportunities in your life and that's a fact yeah i absolutely agree with that and I think there's been a tipping point in and it's not that long ago really where social media etc was sort of a peripheral exercise but now I know that I do this if I'm wanting to get a bit of a handle on someone that I'm reaching out to I'll jump straight on their

Facebook page I'll read their LinkedIn profile I'll have a look at their Instagram posts and I'll get a sense of who they are before I've even decided whether I want to take it any further. So I think what I'm seeing, and you'll be all over this more than me, but I think more and more the consistency of what you're doing across all of those things is going to make a massive difference because if you're not sort of coming across, you know, in terms of a consistent perception across all of those things these days,

is people just aren't even going to reach out. Would I be right in saying that, mate, or not? Absolutely. Like, I think it's just, it's a fact of life now that if you're putting your hand up for a job, bank on the fact that your social media profiles are going to be stalked by the HR person and your name is going to be Googled

and they're going to look at the search results and they're going to see what comes up. and if you've set up a silly blog or posted some crazy photos or whatever they will come up and that will influence for better or worse what happens with with that job or whatever it is that you're aspiring to achieve so it's a it's a challenge and it's it's challenges that are pretty unique to this generation but it is what it is and that's why it's so important to take ownership of it and that's the thing that's one of the big takeaways is there's enough there's too many people out there that just don't take ownership of their personal brand and you don't

have to have a strategy around it um you know to to really grow the personal brand but at the very least take control over it and and manage it yeah i've read a blog that you wrote some years ago where you're sort of encouraging people to become their own media company, essentially, which I thought was a great way to sum it up because once you start thinking like that, you're then consciously aware of everything you do, wherever you do it,

how is this reinforcing what I want people to know about me or conversely, how is it detracting from that? Because once you've implanted that seed of, okay, well, I really do need to think about what I'm saying and doing and whatnot here because it could come back and bite me in the backside, you start to approach things differently. And I guess what I'm keen to drill into, mate,

for those that are really lifting their head going, yeah, I hadn't thought about this, but I really need to be doing something about it. Where do they start and, you know, what sort of things do they need to be thinking about to make a move in that direction? Yeah. Yeah, it's a good question.

It's funny, I'm working with a few guys at the moment on their personal brands in particular, and we are starting from scratch. So it's been a really good process to work with them on. But for these guys, I've broken it up into really three big chunks. First one is preparation, then strategy, then execution. So preparation is the big piece, and this is where you want to get as much clarity on who you are now and where you want to get to and be really honest with yourself and you actually got to really ask yourself some hard

questions and that's the thing even in my my marketing travels is people people don't ask they don't want to ask themselves those hard questions about who they are and really and whether that is even close to lining up with where they want to get to how do you approach that because you're absolutely right everyone's pretty quick to point the finger at everyone else and we can be critical of what everyone else is doing or not doing but the mirror work can be pretty confronting and i guess you become that mirror how do you uh sort of comfortably get them through that process to particularly where there's a massive difference between what they think they are and and what you're reading is how they're

coming across yeah exactly so first of all asking them to articulate those key things around their purpose and vision and values and whether their behaviors line up with that um most people to be honest when i start there they don't have any clarity around that yeah so that's the first point so they don't have any clarity around that and the next step is okay well what's the end goal which is that could be way down the line that's the other thing that they don't have clarity on is oh kind of i'm thinking i might want to get here but i'm not really sure particularly as a marketer like i really need to know where you want to get to otherwise we could be wasting our time i could be wasting my time you could be wasting your time and we could just be banging

our heads against the wall yeah so there's this whole preparation phase and um you know not only the purpose vision values etc but who do you really want to reach and influence um how others perceive you at the moment versus how you want to be perceived those key unique things about what makes you stand out from the rest what makes you unique whether that's professionally or otherwise that's a hard thing for a lot of people to i mean if you're up to the eyeballs in an industry along with a heap of others that can be often quite a challenging thing to go what really is different about me or conversely uh you get the situation where someone says oh i'm different because of this this and this but it just happens to be the same thing that everyone

else says they're different about how do you maneuver through that little exercise yeah that's where there's a there's a fair bit of coaching involved and i used to go through that a lot with lawyers who would tend to say the same thing initially it was like well no let's let's dig a bit deeper like every other lawyer's told me the exact same thing as you know like what is it about you like like let's talk about your experiences what have you done or achieved that others may not have and then as you coach them through this this process you start to move beyond the cliches and the bias yeah okay well now we've got something to work with here and it's funny i work with um working with a chiropractor at the moment and i sent him

these set of questions to really kind of go away and dig deep on and he thought oh this looks pretty straightforward and um he ended up having to redo it three times he said did it once then just goes no this is crap wiped it started again he did that three times before he actually came came to that point where he goes all right like i feel like i've i've now been honest with myself and gone through this process and now i have the foundations to then look to the next step which is the strategy and and execution yeah okay yeah perfect so let's let's transition straight into that but so that the strategy stage what's involved in that piece mate yeah so the so strategy is really how like how we so we we can't understand who we are and and where we want to get

to from a personal brand perspective but but how are we going to do that and particularly in a sustainable and an authentic way so the strategy has to be true to that brand and um and also your own skill set and experiences yeah so the big thing i learned again particularly working with lawyers who are you know they just they tend to be fascinating marketing case studies but but the thing about them is like you learn pretty quickly where someone's strengths and weaknesses lie in a marketing perspective so bushy you're a unique one you're you're multi-talented um in in this perspective but there are some people who um aren't charismatic aren't social at all and for them to front up to an event and and network like they might understand they need to do it but geez

they would they would rather die than do that like that's the worst thing in the world yeah but that person might be an amazing writer and i used to come across lawyers like this all the time who would have those these different skill sets so then in terms of the strategy you build around the strengths of of the person gotcha so you know for listeners out there who are thinking about this well if you think about the the gamut of um different things you can anyone can do to build their brand or to to market themselves start by playing to your strengths and what you're comfortable with um there are others who who hate writing like like i work with a lot of other people it would take them half a day to write a 400 word blog and i completely understand that

so you don't build a strategy around that you find what their strengths are and then the other aspect is getting the messaging right so if you've done the right preparation in terms of your personal brand you get the messaging right so and that's that's what you guys have done really well at know how is is getting those clear messages that you drive home and that it's it's consistent across the board whether you're talking on a podcast or talking on 60 minutes or talking to someone at an event you've got those key messages that are that align with your personal brand and you're driving them home and it's almost like coming back to the startups it's it's having an elevator pitch about who you are and what you can offer and and what you do yeah i think what what

i think's been really a massive advantage to us is because like everyone else you tend to get very jargonistic about what you do and you and and we focus on what we do but the average punter one doesn't need to know that jargon to the detail that you go into makes absolutely no difference to them and i think what's been really good with with your input and guidance is that we're now communicating in a language and talking about stuff that that the people we're trying to help really want to know about yeah so uh and that's that's the magic that i think you bring to the table in that regard in in getting that messaging right because uh it's certainly a challenge for Anyone who's been involved in anything for any length of time,

you get very insular in that exercise and lifting the head and going, well, hold on. That might be important to me, but do the people I'm trying to help give a crap about that? Probably not. Spot on. And that's one of the big learnings that I got early on, working under Dave Burtinshaw at the Crows and then at Nine,

was understanding what's newsworthy. And it becomes instinctive for me in the end to understand, right like you might feel this is important but does your audience feel that this is important where does it rank for them does it does it engage them in any way are they interested in this is this unique is it fascinating to them if it's not well then you don't put it out there that's that's the reality and and it can be very hard for people to get out of that because when you're in the industry or when you're in a business it becomes all consuming and you can't see outside of your little bubble but it's really important to look outside the bubble and everything has to connect

with your target audience that's that's the ultimate yeah absolutely okay well we've we've hit the um preparation we've developed a strategy uh let's move into the execution side of the equation what's that look like yeah so i mean it probably plays into a little bit with what i what i said in strategy but the sustainability is key so you need to execute in a way that isn't going to blow your budget i've worked with a client in the past who we did some really cool things with podcasting and content and he got a little overexcited and said i'm gonna now employ a full time video guy wow to to follow me around and we're just going to create some cool content and then six months later i think he'd spent 40 grand or something and and got nothing from it

and he said yeah i'll probably jump the gun there that's what we that's what we call building a brand in an unsustainable way um like but the content was great and it did support his personal brand but it blew the budget and it there was it didn't have the commercials to back it up yeah so that's always that's always the balance and i don't care what anyone says you can build a personal brand with zero budget you can create a blog you can um everyone has the ability to to build their personal brand uh it's great if you've got the gary vaynerchuk kind of thing where you've got a whole team that follows you around everywhere and you can just riff and someone's going to just create content and publish 100 pieces a day we're all not there yet but anyone can create a

sustainable system that works for them to to build their brand and remember that building a brand is a long-term investment and we talk about investment on this podcast you've got to be thinking long term with this you can't be thinking well i'm going to build my brand today and tomorrow i'm going to get what i need from it no this is this will pay out over it should pay out over your entire career so that's the key let's let's put some parameters around long term because i reckon seem really important for people to get a the correct expectations around that mate can you sort of put some flesh around the bones there yeah so so the personal brand strategy will ultimately be determined by where you want to get to in terms of that preparation phase that

i talked about so if you've set that optimum goal of where you want it to get to that will take a certain period of time and that you know depending on what that is that could be a couple years it could be five years ten years whatever my view is that personal brand should be ongoing yeah and and it should for at the very least the entirety of your career you should be conscious of it it may look differently depending on what phase you're in terms of career and business but it should always be a consideration yeah and you should at the very least be controlling and managing it. I always say with this stuff, you start small as you build confidence in yourself and what you're doing. And one of the big things I've learned is to test. So again, the video

example, if you decide today that you want to build your brand, don't go and commit to a video agency 40 grand tomorrow. What's the minimum viable product of what you want to achieve? well i might start by just recording doing some live videos yeah i'm using my phone on facebook and i'm going to test what the reception is to that i'm going to get feedback from my mates on facebook and yeah and if i feel comfortable with it well then i can look to scale it up if it moves the needle then i'll scale it up yeah so starting small and building organically as you gain confidence and then when you get to that point yeah shit like um videos dominating for me well now i can potentially look to engage an agency to support me with that to help me

create higher quality content yeah but it needs to be based on evidence yeah yes yes yes so it's not just a gut feel it's like okay we're actually seeing some actual improvements here now let's build on that yeah okay i guess that's one thing that i probably haven't mentioned is in terms of evidence is is having those goals so um something that you can measure against there's a lot of again working with a number of businesses over the years a lot of people will operate purely on gut feel yeah i think that worked i think it didn't work um like like there's there's always a place for gut feel but when particularly when you when you're engaging in a strategy in terms of building a brand and and spending marketing dollars you need to have measurable metrics

whatever that might make it might be depending on your goals yeah 100 i think that applies to everything actually but uh absolutely spot on there all right well so let's talk about the how then mate and perhaps share with us some examples of uh some that you've worked with and and where where they started and where they ended up and and uh what you assisted them to do that that got such good results yeah sure so there's some great case studies that that i often use one in particular um there's a lady and i will name her even even if she doesn't want to be name no it's fine uh jane miller so she's actually just finished up at tgb she's a great lady great lawyer a family lawyer here in adelaide so when i was working full-time at the law firm she'd just

come back from maternity leave and and as is the case for a lot of professional women coming back can be quite tough because you know that that client flow might have dropped right down and you're really starting from scratch yeah but she was really smart she sat down with me and she said look, I've got time, I want to build my brand and I want to take the time to build this practice while I've got the time, so how do we do it? So we put this plan in place to help her become perceived as one of the most respected and influential family lawyers

in the community. As I said off the top, the great thing was is that she has the skills and the work and the experience to back that up. So she was genuinely already one of the really good lawyers out there. And all we had to do was build a brand around that. So to achieve this, building trust, credibility, and authority is absolutely key. And that's really for any professional.

So how do you build that? Well, for me, it always comes back to content creation. If I'm a lawyer, there's really two ways to demonstrate that I know what I'm talking about. And that's for you to either engage me as a lawyer or for me to show you what I know by creating content. So the second part is what I can take care of. So we got her blogging around key topics and issues. We created a lot of blogs with Jane, huge amounts, and it built instant credibility for her in terms of if you don't know a lawyer

and how do you know that that lawyer knows what they're talking about? I don't know law. How would I know? Exactly. But if I go to Jane's profile and I see that she's written 30 blogs on the exact issue that I'm experiencing at the moment, instantly that connects with me and I go, okay, I think this woman knows what she's talking about. And then the other benefit that had was obviously the search engine ranking.

So she started getting leads from those blogs as well. Yeah, so if you're searching for that subject and she keeps coming up, it's like, oh, okay. Yeah, but for me that was the secondary benefit. Like, I was looking to build her brand, and that was really effective. And it's in the same way as what you've done, Bushy, with writing a book and the credibility that comes with producing that content. Like, you know, I see that book you've written. I know that you know what you're talking about.

Like, it's pretty instant. Even if I don't know much about property, I can look at that blog, I can look at that book, I can see what you've written, and instantly you're credible in my eyes. i guess the the second part to support that was media so for for most people and it's it's a little bit sad and but even i do it if i see someone regularly quoted in the media in the mainstream media instantly i'm starting to build this perception of them in my mind that okay they must be a bit of an expert if it's good enough for just 60 minutes to go to bushy martin for

for a quote about this topic. Well, jeez, Bushy must know what he's talking about. If it's good enough for 60 minutes, it's good enough for me. So we applied the same thing with Jane and I was putting out press releases, I was pitching story ideas around Jane and her insights. Jane and I would, you know, every second day we'd sit in the office and we'd talk about news ideas.

So we'd go, I'd say, what's happening in family law, Jane? Like, what's going to be interesting out there? And she goes, well, here's these five issues that I'm seeing a lot in family law. And I go, oh, right, three of these are actually really good story ideas. And then I would go package up those story ideas and pitch them to journos. And they'd go, great, this is awesome.

And they'd go and interview Jane and quote Jane and put a picture up and it would become a major story in the advertiser or whatever it is. And then media fuels media. So then when there's a social or family issue occurring, for whatever reason, journos go, well, who are we going to get to comment about it? oh, I've seen that Jane lady quoted by other journos, so she must be the go-to.

So all of a sudden, she became the go-to commentator, really, for family issues. So that was massive. Yeah, awesome. And then the final bit is the supporting material. So the really underrated thing when it comes to personal brand is having an excellent bio. Yeah.

So in professional services, 80% of web traffic goes to biographies on websites. So people are, you know, whether it's accounting, finance, law, property, if they're referred to that firm, they will go, right, well, who are the key people here? They'll go and they'll dig around and they'll go, well, they'll check out Bushy's profile and they'll go, okay, yep, yep. I'm confident that he has the qualifications and the experience to do what I need him to do. So that's a really important thing. And we worked pretty hard to build Jane's bio and to not only write kind of the overview of her career, but to include links to all the content she's written, to all of the media placements that she's appeared in and really build that brand. So they were the key things there, mate.

And it was huge. I mean, I remember hearing whispers in the industry that people were talking about Jane having an unfair advantage, whatever that means. You know, it was huge. It was huge, and the phones were going off the hook to the point where clients couldn't get in to see her for months, and she had to really start feeding her team and change her systems. And the great thing about content is it's evergreen. So content that Jane had written two years prior was still generating leads.

Wow. Yeah, so that was the exciting thing. Over what sort of period then, from the day you sat down with Jane until it was really ticking over? How long were we talking? So we started to get traction with Jane really fast. So that would have been two to three months as we started to get a bit of media coverage.

And it doesn't always happen with everyone like that. I mean, it was a bit of a sweet spot in that Jane had time and also there was a real gap in the market. There was no one talking about these issues. Family law was... There was no commentary around it, but also it's very human interest related. related so media were very open to to talk about issues around family and divorce because it's

it's affecting so many people and um and you know it impacts kids and it's it's it's very emotive which again is a major driver for media so it really blew up i guess backed by media and then all the supporting content that started to rank on google pretty quickly it became a bit of a beast to be honest it was pretty awesome yeah that is awesome mate yeah it's a sense i and i know myself that uh in brainstorming stuff with yourself when we uh released uh both books actually what you're really good at is is talking to me and saying okay well i reckon this is the sort of stuff that people are going to want to listen to let's put together a bunch of headlines that are associated with that and then let's put that out there and uh it's and then just see what

bites and that's just been sensational mate because again you're focused on what people want to hear read listen to and then you can craft craft the stuff that you're good at around that and then everyone wins yeah and it's i've only noticed the other day i meant i meant to tell you it's um the media has been really effective for you like i was i was researching something around a property topic for some content that I was going to do with you and I was digging around some articles and you were already quoted in those articles. So I was like, well, he's doing all right.

I'm trying to research this topic and I'm finding you commenting on that topic already. So that's how you know you're starting to get some cut through. Awesome. Yeah, no, it's good to know, mate. Any other examples of other people you've taken on a similar or other journey to go from where they are to where they are? they want to be mate yeah there's i mean there's probably some shorter ones i mean working at

pickstar working with athletes all the time is another set of really interesting case studies because you've got guys that that are almost handed an instant personal brand based on their their on-field skills and attributes but they actually need to build out the other aspects of of their brand and that's been really interesting i mean one guy who worked quite closely with because he's a co-founder of Pickstar, but Matthew Pavlich for guys that know their AFL legend. Frio's greatest player, South Australian, one of the best in the business.

But really admired what he's done with his brand over the years. One of the few athletes to focus on the broader aspects of his brand almost from the day he was drafted in terms of being perceived as elite, as a leader, as an influential commentator and family first. And he lives and breathes that, not just kind of in the headlines, in the media, but he lives it. And because of that, he's become a very sought-after corporate brand,

and there's not many athletes that can do that. No. He's got corporate partnerships with Woodside and other kind of mining and investment companies. Massive. He's always, he managed to align himself in that corporate space and it's very lucrative for an athlete but not many can really pull it off and he's done that so well.

Yeah, yeah, you're right because I mean the superheroes for a very short space of time, the old 15 minutes has become 15 seconds and to be able to sustain life after sport would be very challenging for those guys and you're right Matthew Pavlich has certainly maintained a really good profile in the right areas and he is you do think of him as family first and as a leader and he just has that whole persona wherever you see him so awesome work there mate well sort of bringing it to a head there mate if you to summarize some of the the key tips or lessons that the listeners might need to bring together to start building their own personal brand what would you say yeah so coming

back to those preparation points so being very real about who you are and and who you want to be yeah and asking yourself those hard questions is key and then walk walking the talk understanding that to do this it's it's a bit live by the sword die by the sword type of thing so if you're going to put yourself out there understand that um if it's surface level you will be exposed particularly if you're doing media stuff um yeah yeah you can you can get found out pretty quickly if you don't have the experience and the genuine skills to back it up um another big thing to be an influencer or thought leader you just have to be creating content it doesn't mean that you have to be writing blogs or doing a podcast you need to find a way um whatever fits with your skill set and

experience to be creating content and publishing your insights yeah that one let me jump straight in on that one because what i've really enjoyed about working with you mate is that uh i can knock up a bunch of dot points that i think are sort of irrelevant uh to what we're talking about and then you can turn that rough bit of dirt into a shining diamond in very quick time and cut down what can be a phone book full of thoughts from me into a very succinct message that is really hitting the hot buttons for the people that are interested in that subject. That's a real skill.

So I'd reinforce what you're saying there. You don't have to write War and Peace yourself. you just if you're able to come up with the bullet points that you think are the key pieces and then work with someone like yourself who can really turn that into some gold then you can create some really engaging and enduring content as a result yeah exactly and i think what i've seen with you and what i've seen with others that i've worked with is you know the the bit of dirt that you describe improves over time it's like it's a bit of a coaching process is as you learn from how I craft the content and the messaging

and the angles that I take an interest in or that I see, I see your notes that you provide to me become better and they have more clarity and you become more certain of your message and you're getting a better understanding through this process of your brand and what's really going to connect with your audience. And I see that all the time with my clients. It starts off hard for them, but as they go through this content creation process, it's a really refining process. And what I would encourage people is to not feel like they have to deliver the perfect piece of content from the outset,

but to keep creating and to keep trying and to keep learning. And that's what I've always done, is you've got to test these things. And then as you go, you end up learning what people want, and you end up learning what really resonates both with your audience but also you as your personal brand. Yeah, spot on, mate. Yeah, bring it. Yep, yep.

Sorry, Matt, I interrupted. Go on. No, I guess probably the final two things is getting really clear on that personal elevator pitch to be able to succinctly define your personal brand in that sentence or two. And then the second, the final thing is the fact that what you do It has to be sustainable and you have to see it as an investment. You've got to commit to this stuff.

Yeah, yeah, and it does. It can be quite daunting for people who are absolutely flat out at work and then they've got family and other commitments after hours. Throwing this on top feels like a burden, but I can honestly say that if I compare where I was at and our business was at five years ago to where it is now, having spent the last couple of years spending a lot of time with you refining and and really creating the discipline to be sitting down on a regular basis and and putting your thoughts out

there made a massive difference so really worth doing mate now that's been awesome mate well i'd like everyone else i it wouldn't be the get invested podcast if i didn't put you through the ambush uh series so i'm gonna make a dance a bit on these mate and i just want to kick into what's your favorite quote and why yeah i had to think about this one and there's because i'm not a not a big quotes guy for whatever reason but there's one in my office that's that's stuck on my wall and i keep going back to it i love it it is most careers turn into sales jobs when you get senior enough and that's from sam altman at y combinator so what he means by that is that sales is just kind of ultimately the lifeblood of every business and i was the same like when it came to

sales i was like like i don't really want to do sales like it's a bit icky um but now like you know having been in business myself sales is everything getting deals done is everything ultimately that's what we want to do in business is get deals done and this guy so i don't know if you know much about y combinator but they're the kind of the leading startup accelerator um organization in the world so they you know they scaled up dropbox airbnb like they discovered airbnb when they were you know guys that were flogging off um air air mattresses in san francisco So these guys know business and most careers turn into sales jobs when you get senior enough is very true.

Yeah, I love it. Yeah, it's so true, mate. What never ceases to amaze me, particularly in professional services, is you mention that word sales and people immediately start to put their finger down their throat or they back away. And yet it is absolutely fundamental. I keep saying to people, we're not in the finance business, we're in the relationship business and don't don't kid yourself that's not about sales

that's about helping someone to achieve a goal or satisfy a need that they don't know how to do themselves it's about as simple as it gets so but it's quite a mind shift thing mate and it's so fundamental for those that who recognize that you can really see the difference it makes in their their career and and lifestyle generally now spot on what on the on the reading side mate uh you know i'm an avid reader but uh what's the top book that you'd recommend and why so there's probably a few that have been particularly influential for me over the last few years big one was um traction by gabrielle weinberg so that really helped me formulate you know i was talking about these uh testing marketing ideas and instead of waxing 50 grand

or an advertising campaign, well, how can you construct a scientific test with $200 to identify whether it's going to work or not first? Yeah. So I would recommend anyone that's interested in marketing or is going to be looking at spending some dollars on marketing, read Traction by Gabrielle Weinberg. The other one, I know one of your other guests mentioned

at the end of Jobs by Taylor Pearson, talking about the future of work and how that's evolved to the entrepreneurial economy, which is a short but really good read yeah um and then the final one for me is a little bit different but ecclesia by ed silvoso which talks about the real purpose of the church to transform the community going back to how the church was supposed to be yeah i love it which is a pretty fascinating read yeah because there's a real uh spiritual hallway i think uh in the the current community generally which sort of rolls into morals and and behaviors and the way we treat each other. So, yeah, I haven't heard of that one, mate. I'll make sure I grab a copy.

Mate, now, this one's a bit left field, buddy, but it's a question that everyone asks me, particularly given that we're involved in the investment space, but what's the top thing that you've legally done to minimise how much tax you pay, Monty? Yes. Now, my big weak spot is accounting and numbers and that sort of stuff. So, one thing i have learned is to get good advisors around me bushy and i know you're big on that yeah but i got some good advice about setting up a trust and getting a good structure in place so that's the big thing for me is um yeah getting that advice about what structure is going to be optimal for me with with where i'm at um and that of course has tax benefits yeah absolutely now that's a

that's a cracker now this one doesn't just apply to investing in property shares or you know the material stuff it can be business or personal or what have you but what's both the worst and the best piece of investment advice that you've received today it's interesting because i'm kind of walking through this now bushy as i said it's not hasn't been natural for me um but the thing that i've been learning in the last six months is about untethering myself from um the world's kind of debt-based system if you know what i mean yeah where everything is debt driven and it's become habitual for most people so it's not really a in terms of best piece of advice not a succinct kind of one-liner but it it shows what i'm thinking there in terms of um reading some

content and getting some advice around how to untether myself from that that debt way of living and and bringing in giving as a part of that and and how like the principles of giving how they actually can unlock things for you in a almost like a supernatural way so yeah yeah that's a whole nother big beast yeah but that's yeah it's been made it's been a fascinating journey and i guess in line with that the the worst advice that i've got over the journey is to is taking on debt um in the name of tax reasons like oh you know but you know if you do this then you know you can kind of get it back on tax and but most of the time that's that doesn't work or well if you if you're spending a dollar to get 30 cents back it's not making a whole lot of sense is it really

spot on mate yeah my accountant's always said to me mate if you just want to get a bigger tax tax return i'll just charge you more no problems there very good very good now awesome now let's get back to the personal stuff and you've sort of really lightly touched on a couple of these things but a personal habit that you believe contributes to your success so far uh probably The big thing is at least trying to be teachable and, where possible, parking up my ego and listening and learning. And what I have learned is that not everyone's like that. And constantly being teachable,

particularly from guys who have credibility in whatever space it is. So even just the great thing about helping you create content, Bushy, is I get to learn from what you know about investment and property, which I had no idea about, like reading your book and things like that. It's been amazing. But then it's kind of being teachable just around the circles that you move in your networks, and that's the advantage of having great networks

is you should be positioned around people who can teach you things and making sure that you're able to listen. And I guess the other thing that I've always tried to do is be consistent um and in whatever aspect of life um be consistent be level be reliable commit to things and and do them properly yeah i love that mate you're absolutely right that the consistency uh you know i'd wax lyrical about the need for resilience and patience and persistence as the muscles that sort of been withering in the last generation because of our instant iphone everything well but time and time again success i see in any endeavor always

takes 15 to 20 years so unless you've uh able to be consistent and just keep plugging away knowing that uh it's going to get you to where you need to then a lot of people fall short so yeah awesome last question then it's one i always ask if um uh let's take your own kids as an example if we if If you were to sit down with them when they're leaving school, a bit like your good old man did for yourself, what would you advise them to invest their time, energy and skills in to create their version of freedom? I think I would push them towards getting experience.

So it's really broad, I know, but experience in wherever they broadly want to go. So, again, that's one thing that I learned from my journey is that if I didn't get experience early on, I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing today. And experience, you know, as a youngster, getting experience informs them pretty quickly whether it's something they want to do or not. You know what I mean? You can learn pretty quickly. so it's not just like gap years and all that sort of stuff are great and i'd have i'd have no problem with my kids doing that after school or or going straight to uni like that that's great as well but if they're doing that i think they i would be encouraging them to get some solid life experience

in whatever field they may be interested in yeah yeah try a lot of things and then really decide what that is what you want to do and that'll help you decide in any case yeah i love it absolutely Awesome, mate. Look, always love having a chat, mate. It's good to put this down on tape so everyone else can join in the conversation. Love it. What's next new and exciting for you, mate? Oh, there's lots happening at the moment, mate.

So I'm taking the handbrake off my apiro business, which has been pretty manageable and a little bit limited over the last few years as I've focused on the start-up. So I'm really looking forward to taking the handbrake off of that and growing both professionally and personally. It's really funny doing these chats, Bushy, and I'm not normally the one on the other side of the mic talking, but the things I advise my clients about I haven't done for myself.

So I'm talking about... That's pretty normal, mate. An accountant doesn't do his own tax return. An architect never finishes his own house. That's pretty much part of the course, mate. Yeah, so I'm actually looking forward to being my own case study, to be honest, and applying some of these things that I teach others on myself

and, yeah, looking forward to seeing what comes of it. I'm sure that's going to go well, mate, because the grounding that you've had with everything you've shared with us today was suggesting to me that you've had your hands dirty with it, You just haven't, and you've done it directly for other people. So you have done it, but you just haven't done it for yours truly. Absolutely.

That's going to be fun and games. I know there'll be listeners here who go, this is really resounding with me. I really do need to start doing something around my personal brand. How can they contact you, mate, if they're interested in having that chat? Yeah, sure. So the website is apiroconsulting.com, A-P-I-R-O, consulting.com. LinkedIn I'm pretty active on I quite like LinkedIn I never used to like it when I first signed up but there's some good content and some good connections on there so I'm pretty active on

LinkedIn if you want to look me up it's Montessi with one s they're probably the best best two points to get me mate yeah fantastic mate look thanks again buddy yeah we'll have you back again to delve into other subjects around this because it's it it's fair to say that we're living in a world where increasingly given there is that absolutely constant volume of noise pollution if we are going to rise to the top we really do need to be smart about how we're positioning ourselves and and how we make that happen and your skill set will increasingly become in much higher demand as a as a result of that mate so we appreciate your time today thanks for having me matt really enjoyed it good on you buddy thanks mate talk soon

Well, Freedom Fighters, how good was that? To get a summary of all this investment gold in the show notes, just email me on hello at khgroup.com.au. That's H-E-L-L-O at khgroup.com.au. Or check us out at www.bushymartin.com.au forward slash getinvested. I look forward to joining you next week for another episode of the Get Invested podcast. so thanks for listening and as always dream as if you live forever and live as if you'll die tomorrow