Start With A Win - Personal Branding 101

Episode Date: May 8, 2019

On this episode of the Start with a Win podcast, Adam and Mark talk about building your own personal and/or professional brand. Now “branding” has become a buzzword in today’s business world, but most people do not adequately grasp what is means to build a brand, so they aren’t reaping any of the benefits. For the purposes of this episode, we will define your brand as “the thoughts and emotions evoked when people think about you.”Your brand should encompass your values, persona, passions, and focuses in whatever industry you are serving. This needs to be define-able and easy for people to understand, so sit down and really take the time to think about what you want your brand to include. Consult some of your friends and colleagues, and perhaps even go through a 360-degree evaluation process to see how others perceive you. This will help you determine how to tailor your image or and begin to live out your brand through social media and your other platforms.Once you have found your brand, reach out to people who can help you with things like a logo, a website, business cards, etc. as you prepare your content. Based on your brand, determine what types of content you should create, how it should be distributed, and what platforms should be used. It is crucial to understand that you cannot post the same video on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn because each of those platforms encourages specific content types and elicits different interactions or engagements from your audience. You also must recognize that “doing Facebook” does not mean scrolling through your news feed and liking one of your clients’ statuses and calling it a day. You would be amazed how easy it is to set up Facebook ads to promote your brand, and the results from just a $5 ad could bring in several new leads with minimal effort on your end.After this episode, Adam challenges you to build your personal or business brand. Go to a freelancing site and hire someone to help you with the deliverables you aren’t strong in, and just launch into the world as a well-defined value-creator.Links:360 rating site: https://www.selfstir.com/Freelancing: https://www.fiverr.comFreelancing: https://www.upwork.com/Brand Viva Media: www.brandvivamedia.comConnect with Adam:https://www.startwithawin.com/ https://www.facebook.com/adamcontosREMAXCEO/ https://twitter.com/REMAXAdamContos https://www.instagram.com/REMAXadamcontos/ 

At top of the 12th floor of the Remax World Headquarters, you're listening to Start With a Win with CEO Adam Kantos. And top of the 12th floor of Remax World Headquarters here in Denver, Colorado. Welcome to Start With a Win. It's Adam Kantos here with producer Mark. How are you, Mark? I am just wonderful. Just, ah, Mark? I am just wonderful. Just, ah, I love it. Just wonderful. Amazing. So good.

So good. And everything else. That's right. Everything else in between. All of it. Yeah. Hey, man, I'm digging your new brand for your podcast and start with a win. Isn't it cool? Yeah, it's pretty sweet. I got a great brand guy put that together for me.

I've heard. Yeah. His name's producer Mark. Hey, there you go. Yeah, no, but it's, it's, uh, you know, branding is one of those things that a lot of people don't think about, but is very important. That's a, that sounds like a good podcast topic. You know, I would agree with you, Adam. You would. All right. Well, let's, let's talk about branding today, my friend. Yeah. I think that would, I think that'd be good. Cause I think that, uh, if you have a small business or if you're an entrepreneur, uh, and I would even say that even in the business world, um, you know, I always kind of had a personal brand, right? Uh, I was the guy with the white glasses. Right. That was me. You got rid of those white glasses though. Yeah. You know, I still rock them out at the gym. Oh, nice. Yeah. Cause they're

very sporty. They are quite sporty. So they work well at the gym. Gym sporty. But you know, that was a part of my personal brand. It was like, Hey, that guy with the white glasses. Well, it works. I mean, they're memorable. It, it sets you apart, apart, makes you unique, gives you personality. I mean, it, that's really what a personal brand is. It's, it's one of the thoughts that somebody assigns to you. So what kind of thoughts and emotions does, does, does your brand and do you evoke when somebody sees or hears about you? Right? Yeah. Yeah, totally. And I think that not enough people sit down and reflect on that. It's funny you say that because when I went through business school, they say, you're going to walk out of here with a great understanding of how businesses operate.

And part of it was marketing, but we never really got into how to build a personal brand. And I think it's, you know, you mentioned it for entrepreneurs, for business leaders, business owners, things like that. It is incredibly important, especially, you know, you look at our space, the real estate industry, you are your own business. And granted, you know, we, we've got the amazing Remax balloon, Remax brand, but you gotta be your own brand also. Yeah. So let's talk about how to build your own brand during this episode. Okay. Yeah. No, I love that. I think that's awesome. Let's do it. Yeah. So when, when you were talking about business school too, it made me think about, you know, I've heard you say they teach you all this stuff, but then they don't talk much about personal

brand if at all, but you as a CEO, right. That's one thing that you're looking at as far as what has a person built before they come to you for a job. Right. Well, the brand that you walk in and interview with is the brand that we want to see because that's the reflection of how you operate. That's reflection of your business acumen, your ability to interpersonally communicate with other people, your ability to carry forth the brand and the mission of the organization that you're applying for a job at. So if you haven't built a personal brand, you're walking in to an interview, I don't want to say this in a bad way, but really as kind of nobody. You haven't built this aura of value about you. All you've got is your

resume and your ability to talk your way through it. Whereas if you walk in with a personal brand, no matter where you're going, no matter what business you're walking into, you walk in with a personal brand and people are going to go, hey, I looked up your personal brand and this is pretty amazing. Can you do this for my company? So it really truly does make a difference. And it, it demonstrates your values. It demonstrates your persona. It demonstrates, um, you know, values and value that, that you deliver. So people want to know what you're about and what you do. It's just like, like Remax. Remax is a business that builds businesses. That's our North star. That's what we're going after. That's the, you know, the company is the greatest real estate company around, but our, our franchisees and our agents knows as a

business that builds businesses. So what, you know, what should somebody's personal brand be? How do you pick that? Yeah. I mean, I think that you, I think you sit down and you think about the things that are important to you, the things that you value, and maybe even survey some close friends and family and ask them, Hey, what do you think about me? Or what, if, if you had two or three words to describe me, what would those be? Right. And everyone would potentially have something that they would tell you. And then you could say, let me put that in my personal brand column, you know? Right. It's, I mean, it's, it's a great way to think about it. It's almost like, you know, you hear about those, uh, three 60 reviews where you ask everybody, you know,

how does Mark do at his job? Yeah. You know, what are Mark's strengths and weaknesses? It, it's kind of, um, it's kind of a vulnerable situation, but it also allows you to figure out how do you need to tailor your image? How do you need to tailor your brand in order to be the best person that you can be? Because, you know, we always, nobody wants to be the worst person that they could be. Right. So how do I, how do I put my North star out there? How do I put my mantra, my brand and live to it? And wear your feelings on your sleeve and be transparent and live your brand. But I think you need to commit to it and you need to put it out there as well as just have it. Let's talk a little bit about that. How do you display your personal brand to society? You mentioned LinkedIn. We have this huge push on social media. We have the

Start With A Win podcast, obviously. So Start With A Win is what we're recording right now. We've got it on iTunes. We've got a few dozen episodes out. And this has really kind of become my personal brand to a great extent, as well as the social media around it, the value we deliver. So, yeah. Well, and I think when, you know, when we sat down last year and started talking about your personal brand, things like memes, for instance, you know, you put out a lot of quotes and things like that. You've been doing that your whole life. I mean, you, you've enjoyed positivity quotes and quotes about, you know, persistence or hard work or whatever that is, you know, you were probably the guy in your other career who had the poster on his wall,

right? With the eagle and the quote. Every time I hear something or think of something like that, they go, Oh, producer Mark would like to hear this. I write it down as a note. And I know you do the same thing because we trade text messages all the time with, hey, what do you think about this quote? Yeah. But ultimately, what it boils down to is part of your personal brand is marketing your personal brand. If you've got nothing to say, you've got nothing to market. Yeah. So start gathering those things. I've, I've heard it called a swipe file before where you just, you know, if you see something you like, you swipe it and you throw it in the file and keep it in one spot.

So you can, you know, you can write a blog post, you can put down an idea to share with your friends because that's, that's what we're doing. We're having conversations with the people around us, the people that both have a interpersonal relationship with us as well as like a parasocial relationship. So they might know who I am, like one of my agents in another state or another location that I don't see, but they watch what we're doing on social media. They gain some sort of a value from it. And you just saved them time of having to go look for that themselves by delivering that value to them via social media. Well, yeah. And I think that you want to be able to have consistency across all your channels, right? I mean, that's really important because if you are on Facebook

saying a positivity quote, then you're over here on Instagram, constantly posting pictures of food. There's not a consistent message there, right? You don't like my pictures of food. I post on that. Listen, I don't think a green drink every morning would qualify as a good picture. Right. Okay. Gotcha. Oh, that looks so good. Yeah. But yeah, so I think being consistent and just constantly putting yourself in alignment with what you have chosen as your personal brand. So let me kind of summarize what we've talked about so far. So we've talked about finding your brand. What are you?

What defines you? What are you working towards here? And obviously mine is start with a win. I like these ideas of how do you set yourself up for success and then continue to repeat those. And then we talked about creating, documenting, and distributing value. But where do we put those things? Because obviously we put this on a podcast. We have Facebook channels.

So we have Adam Conto, CEO. So we've got that. We've got the Start With A Win website. What else do we have? Instagram. We've got the Start With A Win website. What else do we have? Instagram. We have Twitter. Yeah, and we're actually starting to, you know, we film these episodes,

and then we're going to take them and put them on YouTube. You know, it's kind of taking this one thing, this one medium, right? We recorded a podcast, and then we've taken it and we put it across all these different platforms with a consistent look and feel and, you know, imagery with everything attached to it. So why, why aren't more people doing this? I mean, it seems like there are obviously a fair amount that are, but people start and stop. They're an inconsistent and a lot don't even start. Yeah. What, what's the deal there? You know, it's hard to say. I think a lot of it comes down to just putting your mind to it and setting some personal goals and then executing.

And if you want to learn more about that, we have lots of podcasts and shows on that. And we recently did an interview with Laura Stack. Oh, yeah. We talked about productivity. Productivity Pro. That's right. The Productivity Pro. so check out that episode. But yeah, I mean, I think one is people feel intimidated by it, right? Like, you know, we, we've heard of,

of agents doing simple things like some Facebook ads and getting leads. Whoa. You know, it's like, you mean I can get business off of Facebook? Right. And it's one of those things where people, you know, they think it's really complicated and then they try it out and they say, Oh, that wasn't so bad. I think I could do this more. So here's, here's a dirty little secret about Facebook. Making a Facebook ad is really easy. Yeah. Super easy. Yeah. Don't, don't be afraid. And you know what? Google's your friend. You can,

how to make a Facebook ad. Right. And it's, and it, and it changes all the time. So, um, you know, you gotta, you gotta keep up with what the current, you know, algorithm says you should be doing. And it's not that expensive to try it. You know, Facebook will say, you know, for five bucks, you can reach this many people. But, um, ultimately if you have a business, you should be doing these things. You should build a brand of your business, your personal brand. If, if you want, if your business is, is you as a human being, if you're in sales or something like that, if you own a restaurant, whatever, build a brand

of your restaurant. But for crying out loud, build a brand. It's easy. It just takes you, you talk about doing Facebook. And I always hear about people saying, I'm doing Facebook in my marketing. But you know what they're doing? They're scrolling through the newsfeed. So ultimately, it boils down to create some content that's valuable, assign it to your brand, and get it out the door, right? Just execute. Right. And you know what? People don't care if you screw up. They don't care if you mumble your words or if you're afraid to talk in public or if the photo, the selfie of you, or the video of you isn't production quality, they don't care. They just want to know that you're a human being and

you care. Yeah. And then just be consistent. That's it. Awesome. Well, let's close up with a little challenge for everybody here, Mark. I mean, frankly, I want to challenge all my listeners here to go out and build your own brand. Come up with what your brand is. You can go on a website like Fiverr, F-I-V-E-R-R. Upwork. Yeah, or Upwork. Yeah. And get somebody to make you a logo and start putting that out there with your brand on it and start creating some content. Send some value out there and build your brand and build your business. Awesome. All right. Well, once again, thanks for everybody for being here and, uh, don't forget, start with a win.

Thank you so much for listening to start with a win. We hope you enjoyed today's episode. Don't forget to go onto iTunes and subscribe, write a review or rate the show. It helps us get the word out and reach more people. You can follow Adam on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. And remember, start with a win.