[Podcast] How to Grow Your Personal Brand with Tom Ross & Michael Janda

Grow your personal brand with confidence. Tune in with Michael Janda & Tom Ross as we explore what it takes to maximise your personal brand’s success! These “Biz Buddies” run multi 7-figure businesses and in this episode, you’ll hear the lessons they’ve picked up along the way.

MICHAEL JANDA
Michael Janda is an agency veteran, business coach, and best-selling author of Burn Your Portfolio. He helps creative freelancers and agencies run their businesses with confidence and make more money.

TOM ROSS
Tom Ross is the CEO of DesignCuts and a marketing coach. He co-hosts the Biz Buds podcast with Michael Janda and is probably the most Honest Entrepreneur on the internet. This episode is not to be missed!

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Show Notes

• Tom Ross
• Michael Janda
• Biz Buds Podcast

 

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Transcript (Auto Generated)

Hello, and welcome to JUST Branding, the only podcast dedicated to helping designers and entrepreneurs grow brands.

Hello, and welcome to Episode 17 of JUST Branding. Today we are going to be talking about personal branding with Mike Janda, Tom Ross, and Matt Davies. Mike and Tom are together, the Biz Buddies, that’s a podcast, half as good as ours, but we’ll get to that.

So Mike Janda is a serial entrepreneur, let’s put it that way. He is recently a big Instagram fiend, and he has grown his account from zero to 130 in about under a year or so. He’s also run a very successful agency, which we’ll get into, but as we’re talking about personal branding, we’ll just talk about that.

Tom Ross is also the CEO of DesignCuts, which is a marketplace for designers along with the community and much more. So we’ll get into that. Tom Ross, I’ve known for a good decade or so now.

I’ve even had a beer with him in the UK, I can’t believe it’s that long, but yeah, we go way back, and I’m very excited to have them on the show, welcome.

Thanks, Jacob. It’s good to see you, man. Thanks, Jacob.

What was that beer while we’re on the topic?

Oh, Foster’s, I love it.

Jacob’s favorite.

I travel all the way to the UK and they give me Foster’s.

Yeah, I asked one of my team at the time, I was like, look, we’ve got this big guest there, he’s an old friend of mine, do you mind picking up some beers from the local shop? And he came back with a warm can of Foster’s for our Australian guest, and I’m surprised he stayed after that, Jacob.

That’s our export beer, it’s scraped from the bottom of the barrel, it’s spotted off.

Nothing but the best for you, buddy.

Thank you, mate, thank you. Haven’t forgotten it. So let’s get into personal branding.

What does it mean to you guys? Let’s start with you, Tom.

Yeah, I think personal branding is essentially the same pillars as traditional branding. And Mike and I talked about this recently, we actually bought up your Instagram post, Jacob. You know, the really, really popular one you had where you had that diagram breakdown?

Where it’s like, think you know branding, huh? And then it shows the giant from like Brandmaster Secrets. So it’s got that super detailed look at branding.

And for me, all the same stuff can be applicable for a company’s brand as it can for a personal brand. I think the only difference is with personal branding, you’re doing it on behalf of typically yourself. So you are representing yourself as a brand.

And what that means, I think, in modern day terms is, it’s like the modern day resume. You’re a walking, talking CV, you’re no longer a sheet of paper. You have a network that’s growing around you.

You have a platform. You can build authority and reputation. And you can get a lot of the kind of levers to pull on that big brands do as an individual, which can be enormously powerful.

Totally, and what about you, Mike?

You know, when we talk about trying to define personal branding, it comes from the same concept as defining a brand for a business. We usually think of branding as business, a business element, and it is the perception that people have of your entity, a business company, logo, swoosh, you know. I use Nike as an example of branding all the time, one of the greatest brands ever created, and Nike has a vibe to Nike.

And branding’s hard to tangibly pinpoint what it actually is, and words like vibe, words like essence, words like feeling, those are all the things that are at the heart of a brand. And when we talk about personal branding, it’s the same exact thing, but it applies to an individual person. It’s the vibe that somebody gets of you.

And it’s important to define it. So everybody has a personal brand. This is the thing that I think a lot of people don’t pay attention to, is that they have a personal brand and people assume and expect certain things from someone because they’ve branded them in their head.

They’ve made certain judgments about this person in their head and they expect certain behaviors or experience with that person as a result of this brand perception that they have. Now, when we talk about personal branding, we’re talking about intentionally defining what you want your brand to be known for, your personal brand, and then making conscious decisions to fulfill that brand promise or to create that brand perception in the people that you interact with.

Yeah, I love the word perception because that’s what branding is about. We’re shaping that perception. So when we dive into personal branding, how do you see that perception being shaped?

What is the best way to do that?

Well, I think frameworks like the one I mentioned earlier are really helpful because you can systematically work through something like that as you would for a client or a company and you can apply it to yourself. And I think when you’re a personal brand, the best way to do that is to be the most authentic version of you. But that isn’t to say that that can’t be thought out and structured and intentional.

And again, when Mike and I chatted about this recently, when you really nail this, when you nail branding personal or otherwise, it’s when your customers and your community are saying back to you exactly what you intended them to say in terms of that.

So can you define what you mean by authentic version of yourself?

Sure, well, I think the truest version of you, but that’s easier said than done, right? I think what a lot of people do is they put up a filter and I’m sure you guys experienced this doing the podcast now, putting out content, I know I certainly did. You think it’s easy to be yourself and then you put a microphone in your face and a camera zoomed in on you and then you show that footage to your loved one or your friends and they go, that isn’t the you that I know.

Who’s that weird guy? Why are you speaking awkwardly like that? Why are you not relaxed?

Why are you not yourself? So it’s much easier said than done. And also, people get self-conscious.

They double question what they should be saying in a certain scenario. It’s not just putting yourself out there. So a lot of personal branding is actually kind of introspection, in my opinion, right?

It’s figuring out who you are, what you stand for, all these kind of big life questions. For me, growing a personal brand has actually got me more in touch with who I am as a human being. I know that sounds a bit kind of overly philosophical, but I’m sure you guys have found that too.

Yeah, totally. And the fact that your podcast is honest and it’s honest entrepreneurs, it shows that you are projecting that image. And I know from knowing you for all these years that that is who you are.

So it comes through and you’re so right about being in front of the camera and all that. Even myself, I don’t love videos. I hate being in front of cameras.

I don’t even like speaking. Here I am doing a podcast. My wife laughs at me as well.

She’s like, you don’t even like doing any of these things, but I’m out there doing it and having great conversations like this. So it is not myself, but I’m still putting myself out there to project this perception of whoever I want to be. So that’s kind of like the roundabout way.

Well, I don’t know. I think it is you though. If you were here being like, guys, I’m so freaking comfortable right now.

I’m in my element, like, you know, being someone you weren’t, but the fact you just opened up and showed like a, you know, a little sliver of vulnerability, that’s something I do all the time, right? Because everyone’s faking it and showing the highlight reel and trying to be some character they look up to. It’s much more authentic and you connect with people much stronger, in my opinion, when you open up and say, hey, this is kind of scary.

This is uncomfortable. Here’s my experience. Just open yourself up.

There’s something here about truth, isn’t there? Like, so hi guys, by the way, I’m halfway through. You see, I’ve been good today again, Jacob, just coming in.

Well done. Thank you, thank you. That’s the first time he’s ever complimented me on this whole show.

If this is like, you know, episode 30 or something.

I think every pairing needs a bully. So obviously, Jacob is your bully, Mike’s my bully.

The Brits are just bullied all the time. Move on, Brian. No, there’s something here about truth, isn’t there?

And I think, I mean, for me personally, like truth is like a real core thing that I like to adhere to as much as I can. And, you know, I hold it as a dear value. It’s something that you can, you know, takes a lifetime to build and an instant to lose, right?

That kind of, that truth about who you are and what you’re about and that integrity that you can get. And so I think what you’re talking about around in terms of perception, it’s interesting because what you want is people to perceive something authentic and true about you and isn’t branding. Like I do a lot of work, obviously, with clients as a consultant and isn’t branding as well about helping them define something and then that’s true that they can really live into and own and actually then, or even just slightly ahead of where they are so they can move into that.

But it’s gotta be truthful. It’s gotta reflect something genuine. Otherwise, it will all fall apart in today’s social media world.

People will know it’s not true and then your integrity is lost and your trust is gone. What do you think about that?

I like it. I think, I mean, I love that word truth and it echoes into the idea of authenticity and vulnerability. I think that there’s a blend of those three words and what we’re talking about here.

One of the nice things about personal branding is that everybody has a personal brand, whether they know it or not, unlike a business, you know, a business, a lot of these startup businesses, they have to define it from ground zero because there is no history. There is no, there’s no story of how it grew from infancy to what it is today, unless you’re doing a rebrand of a business, then yes, you have that. But from a personal standpoint, from the time where we are little kids, we are building a personal brand.

It’s shaped by the way that we see things, the experiences that we have, the challenges and successes we have in our lives, the things we start to like and dislike in the world, and all of that echoes into our personal brand. So being truthful, like you’re saying, is all about just embracing the uniqueness of your own life story, and then not being afraid to share that with other people. And all of a sudden, boom, you’re an authentic, real, unique, personal brand, because there is nobody like you.

Matt and Jacob, Tom, there’s nobody like you in all the world.

And there’s no one like you, Michael.

And nobody like me.

One of a kind.

So embrace…

This is getting very Disney, very quick, guys.

Embrace who you are, embrace your uniqueness. And then that’s the start of your personal brand right there. Now, as far as sharing it, sometimes that’s the trick for people, is that they struggle to share their personal brand because of insecurities or whatever.

Oh, will anybody even like it? Will anybody like me? And the answer to that is yes, there are people in the world that will like you.

So don’t be afraid to start sharing you to the world, especially when you do things like what Jacob just did, showing a little vulnerability and a little authenticity, all of a sudden people resonate with that because he’s not pretending to be a brand that he’s not.

Would you guys agree actually, I would say most people struggle to be themselves in life, let alone on social media with a camera in the face with all the pressure that goes with that. There’s tons of people that aren’t comfortable truly being themselves in any situation. And I think the odds are so much higher in a personal branding online capacity.

So I’m not surprised that this is, a fairly difficult thing for people to really nail. There’s not that many people where I look at them and go, damn, they’re so authentic. They’re nailing their personal brand.

Like to know oneself is the hardest thing to do. So it’s no wonder that people struggle with it. But the idea of perception is to craft who you wanna become.

So if you wanna be, let’s say, a brand strategist or a logo designer or whatever it is, like you have to shape that perception. So whether or not that’s actually applying everything that you’ve learned to create a nice portfolio that’s based around logo design, all your content is posted about logo design and all of that. So you’re creating that perception.

And that’s really what it is coming down to. It may not, you may not know yourself fully, but at least in the eyes of others, you can start to be seen as an expert or to be seen as that person who you’re crafting, so.

Tom mentioned something early on when he said that, I don’t remember how you phrased it, but you’ve come to know yourself, Tom, through your own focus of your personal brand and building your personal brand, you’ve come to know and understand yourself.

It’s like putting a mirror up against yourself, right? Doing it.

Uh-huh. And I have too. I thought that was interesting.

We haven’t talked about that in a couple times. We’ve chatted about personal branding. But when you said that, I thought, you know what?

I know myself so much better today after a year-long push of building a personal brand on social media and opening up and being vulnerable and sharing and trying to help people making all kinds of new connections with people all over the world. I understand who I am so much better than I did a year ago. And it’s so gratifying to me as a human being to have more self-awareness than I’ve ever had in my entire life.

And it came from focusing on building a personal brand. I had to focus on it. What do I wanna be known for?

Who am I really? What do I really care about? And as I’ve gone through that introspection, I’ve come to know myself more fully.

And like Jacob said, to know oneself is one of the greatest things in life. I don’t know, it’s probably Ralph Waldo Emerson who said that or something, right? Mark Twain.

We gotta pick one of these authentic… I’m out of authors, actually. Oprah, it could have been Oprah.

But somebody said this at one point.

I think it was Jacob sipping a warm fosters.

It could have been. The other thing I was gonna say here was, yeah, definitely. I mean, if you think about branding, I would slightly disagree with you, if I’m allowed to, Michael.

I actually think even startups have a brand, if we use that definition we had at the start, which was the perception that people have of you, right? So even a startup, people are gonna start having a perception of them, even if it’s unmanaged and chaotic, right? People are still gonna think, make up their mind about what that might be.

But the thing here is it’s about, and I think we mentioned this earlier, it’s about being intentional. That’s the whole thing of branding. It’s about using design to look to get a outcome that you desire, that you would like.

It is about authenticity as well. And in between, there’s this kind of selection, I would suggest, and throw this out there for you guys. Because like, for example, there’s Matt, if you think of Matt as a circle, but there’s business Matt, right?

And business Matt, he needs to reflect certain things because he needs to get paid at the end of the day. But that still can be authentic. That still can be of value to a client.

And so that’s how I perceive it myself. Like I will select certain things that I wanna show, I wanna amplify, I wanna broadcast if you like. But there might be other parts of my life, my family life, I’ve got kids, all that stuff, that I probably wouldn’t push out on my typical channels.

So what do you think about that in terms of selection? Would you agree with that about kind of selecting the things that you feel are relevant and add value to what you’re trying to achieve as a personal brand?

Totally, I totally agree with this. And I have a little bit of a pet peeve with a really popular quote about branding. That is Marty Neumeyer quote that says, and I don’t have a problem with his perception.

It’s exactly what you say here. The big famous quote is, your brand is not what you say it is, it’s what they say it is. That’s a big famous quote.

And that’s what people share. And I sit there and I read that quote and I think, man, I hope that people aren’t taking that at face value because the truth is, is that your brand is what you say it is because you intentionally define what you want your brand to be. Where the customer comes in or the audience is whether they believe your definition or not.

Do they believe that you are manifesting the brand that you’ve defined? So I believe that we’ve got to go and we’ve got to define what we want our brand to be. This is why we do brand strategy as designers.

We do a brand strategy for a client because it’s about defining it and intentionally structuring what you want this brand promise, brand description, brand adjectives, this brand perception to be. And then the question is, does the audience believe your definition or not? And there is truth in the phrase and I’m not saying that Marty Neumeier is wrong in that.

I’m just saying that the way that it’s phrased could be misleading to people who think, okay, well, I guess I don’t define my brand. It’s just whatever they say it is. Well, you got to define it first.

What are your thoughts on that?

I think Marty would go along with that, all the books, et cetera, and I think the point that he’s trying to make there is, look, at the end of the day, you have to follow through, right? So it is believable, right? So it’s not just a veneer or just something you say.

You’ve got to deliver on that promise, on that perception that you’ve sort of cut out for yourself. You’ve got to fit into that. Otherwise, it will all fall flat.

And the ultimate prize is kind of like what you said. It’s almost like when, or Tom, I think you said it earlier. It’s like when people start playing back to you, what you hoped, what you designed for them.

That’s the gold standard, isn’t it?

And I love that. That’s my favorite thing in all of branding. And I shared this with Mike the other day.

We had a whiteboard day when I started my company and we so clearly defined our brand and all our values, how we wanted the market to perceive us. We have had so many customers over the years, verbatim say back to us what was on that whiteboard without us ever telling them those words. Like eerily, we’d go back and be like, that’s word for word.

We’re like, holy crap. And we’re like, that means we nailed it. But yeah, Matt, to your point in terms of, you might not share your full self.

I think it’s important to note, you don’t have to. Some people only share a degree of themselves which they’re comfortable to share. But something that I do notice is there’s a power in sharing more.

You don’t have to do it. You don’t have to like put your family all over your Instagram if you’re not comfortable and you want to protect their privacy, of course. But look at notable celebrities.

And the more open they are, the more they’re in a transparent box instead of an obscured box, the more the public perception of them tends to go up and increase. And a great example of this is Mark Zuckerberg versus Elon Musk. Mark Zuckerberg has a very, there’s actual stats that show his kind of public approval rating and it’s very low.

He’s like this kind of distant robot. No one knows that much about him. They can’t connect with him on a personal level.

Elon Musk on the other hand, he’s known as a bit of a madman, very volatile. He smoked weed with Joe Rogan. He does all this crazy stuff and he shares quite a bit, but he’s actually got a significantly higher public perception because he opens up and because he shares.

And this kind of fits into what I like to call macro branding versus micro branding. I think the macro branding is the kind of top level, what you’re known for. So in Elon’s case, that’s like SpaceX and PayPal, et cetera.

In The Rock’s case, it’s traditionally wrestling and now, you know, Hollywood action movies and stuff. But then there’s micro branding moments. So I know all kinds of stuff about The Rock, like his love of tequila and his epic cheat meals and the fact that he’s kind of a big softie and like a great dad to his kids and he’s got this caring side and, you know, all kinds of things about his values and what he stands for.

You know, dozens and dozens of these small moments and they give greater opportunities for connection and resonance with the community and with the wider industry and so on. And I can pick out all of my favorite people on social media and quite often it is the micro branding, little small personal idiosyncrasies that draw me into them because I see alignment between us.

Nice, I was not worried about their privacy. I was more worried about putting, like protecting the internet from them, to be honest. If you’ve met my kids, they’re all crazy.

Just saying.

Yeah.

I was listening to your podcast on that episode, the Macro and Micro Branding. I love how you talk about those separate things. And yeah, there is a fine line that you have to figure out yourself on how to actually do share.

But when you start to interact and you see other people’s stories and things like that, you can get to see what they like. And if you have some common interests, you get to, you’re attracted to them and you get to know them a little bit better. And you have that dialogue that wouldn’t have happened otherwise if you didn’t share it, if it’s in the dark, you know?

Like, do you go to the gym, do you go to the beach? Do you love doing, do you love Star Wars or whatever it is? There’s some common bond that you can talk about.

It’s so powerful, right? Like Mike is the freaking king at this. Honestly, every time we jump on one of these podcasts, normally on like a minute or two late and I jump in, he’s like talking about their shared hometown or like love of a sports team or whatever.

He’s like the master of commonalities and it comes so naturally to him. And I think, you know, that’s probably responsible for a lot of the relationship marketing that made your career and your agency so prolific.

Is that why you were sharing, Tom, when we first came on, the fact that you’re missing the back end of Love Island tonight? Was that part of the branding that you wanted to?

Exactly, you won’t get a single authentic interaction from me, Matt. It’s all a calculated brand machine. None of it’s natural conversation.

None of us covered that. He’s not even called Tom everybody. No, we don’t even know him.

So can I ask a question here, right? So, okay, so we’ve kind of, we’ve danced around this. We’re talking about meaningful, proactive definition of the perception we are ideally would like to get from my audience.

On one hand, we’re also talking about micro moments of authenticity to build up trust and to share. Can I ask a question like, why would I, well, why would I start to go down and try and start managing this meaning? What’s the kind of the benefit of it?

Should I be selective or should I just do what Tom said and just be, just share my whole life? What’s the, where’s the line and how do we sort of start to mold something and why would we start to mold it? Why wouldn’t we just let it flow?

I think you, it all comes from the exercise of defining your own brand and deciding, you make a conscious decision, like I was alluding to at the start there or in my last comments, you make a conscious decision on how open or closed your brand is going to be. Some businesses are wide open, some are really closed and top secret and it conveys a different brand perception. Some celebrities are way wide open and some are way top secret.

Harrison Ford was one who I know is super secretive and you don’t hear much about him and he’s been in movies for 50, 60 years and been churning in movies. And then you see other people like the Kardashians, for example, that you can’t open any news thing anywhere without seeing everything that’s going on in their lives. And so where do you wanna be in that spectrum?

So you’ve gotta define it. And if we go through a normal brand strategy exercise that we would take a business through, you can apply the same thing to your business. And when we were doing brand strategy, marketing strategy stuff for my agency, when we would do these things for our clients, it all came down to targeting, positioning and messaging.

So defining who your target customer is, who’s your target audience, define who that is, define your unique position in the marketplace, and then how do you message your unique position to your target customer? How do you message that? And the messaging is where the perception comes in.

The messaging is how do you talk, what do you share, what do you show, what are you open about, what are you closed about, what are the phrases that you use, the catch phrases and taglines and things, what is it that you use in your personal brand? And if you see the celebrities who have done this, perhaps not even knowing that they’ve done it, but they’ve done it so well that they have such a great personal brand. Tom mentioned The Rock.

I mean, Dwayne Johnson, master branding expert, masterful. Kevin Hart, and interestingly, the two of them connect and they’re such good friends, but both of them are so good at personal branding, whether they’ve consciously defined it or not. So I think it’s a conscious decision that you’ve got to do and you’ve got to take yourself through this exercise and you’ve got to decide where do you want to fit on this spectrum of sharing a lot and sharing a little because you build a brand around either of those positions.

So can we bring it back down? Let’s talk about the everyday solo freelancer, for example, and how they can help or define their position, their niche and how they can actually create their brand online. Tom, I know you often talk about, well, we’re all coaches, I should mention, so Janda and Ross are coaches as am I, and we often come across niche, at least in our calls, we’re always talking about niche and position and pricing and things like that.

So Tom, I know you have an example of some, I guess some case studies of people who have like changed their niche and then really excelled. So did you want to talk about how that all came to be?

Yeah, sure. From the perspective of personal branding or just niching in general?

A bit of both. So there’s a lot of overlap.

Sure, so yeah, Mike and I are both very hot on niching, as you mentioned. For me, it’s one of the easiest and the smartest and the quickest ways to accelerate your business because there’s other options you can spend 20 years just getting more and more talented and accruing experience. But a lot of my students have actually already got talent.

They’re already well positioned. They’re just, they’re not positioning themselves well by way of a niche. And so a small pivot or an adjustment there and everything explodes to a new order of magnitude.

And it literally is often that. It just takes that coach or that third party set of eyes just to be like, well, hold on, what if you targeted those people? That market would open up so much easier.

And so that for me is the power of niching in a nutshell. And of course it links into personal brand in terms of how you’re gonna position your personal brand and how you’re gonna serve your market. It links into what we talked about in terms of opening up to an extent because you can feel slightly more constrained if you’re within a niche.

You know, I’m not talking about everything I do in my personal life or my personal brand, but I do try and find ways to weave in those micro branding moments. And I know Mike does as well. So I think it’s important to know that if you, you know, there’s tremendous power in niching, but if you do it, you don’t have to obfuscate the rest of your personality from the world.

You know, Mike has his bobble heads out and he has like a silly kind of funny bits of content that he does and he opens up and he’s so personal on the DMs and comments and in his stories and so on. And, you know, same for me, like, you know, I occasionally post stuff about like playing guitar and the fact that I drink excessively at points. You know, there’s all kinds of personal moments that we both share with the world under the umbrella of a more tightly defined niche and brand.

Let’s give the case study. I remember one that you mentioned of a cat, someone niche down to cat illustrations.

Yeah, Catlinus, yeah.

So how did that work? What was her personal brand before and then after?

So before was Cat the Illustrator and I think she had like 200 Instagrams.

So that was her name?

No, I think it was like her personal name or some variant of that. And you went on her profile, she was an illustrator and she just had illustrations about all kinds of random stuff. She clearly had talent, but I always say like, someone’s gonna follow you if they look at your last nine to 15 posts and go, hmm, I really like that stuff.

I’m gonna follow because I expect to see more of it. And if you look at someone’s profile and you’re like, I got no clue what’s coming next. You don’t have that incentive to follow.

And so Cat kind of, you know, we worked through and she had this passion for cats. She had this passion for like really fun, cute illustration style. And like I say, she’d been on 200 followers for some time.

It was like two years or something like that. And she is now, I’m just looking up. Yeah, she’s about to hit 2000.

And that accelerated like, you know, very, very quickly from niching down. And what she enjoyed was she could get so laser focused. So it’s what Mike alluded to.

Suddenly, instead of just trying to reach anyone in the world who cared, which is pretty hard to market to that enormous ephemeral crowd of people, she started going after cat lovers and connecting with them and building relationship with them. And suddenly she’s got this close knit community who are all about cats and love cats and want to buy stuff with cats on. And she’s making friends with like cat people.

So her world became all about cats, but she can still inject her personality into her work. She can still kind of play and get creative and not feel constrained. And I know that’s a very big kind of objection or fear around niche.

I bet people are willing to now pay. I mean, I don’t know this case personally, but I bet people are willing to pay more. Like if I’ve got a cat, I want the best cat illustrator on the planet to illustrate my beautiful cat, I want to go to the cat girl and get that illustrated.

So then cat girl, excuse me, I don’t mean to be derogative, I don’t know her name, but she can charge more, right?

Well, her name is Cat with a K.

Brilliant, Cat with a K girl.

It’s perfect.

Yeah, niching, because it drives up more value and more perceived value, right? I’m sure we’d agree. I mean, I think that that that you’ve shared is a classic example of how you can select and then manage a niche, but there’s a value output at the other end that is exponential.

So somebody looks at that and they think, look, I really wanna, I want the best Cat Illustrator. She clearly is the best, because all she’s doing all day long is Cat illustrations. So she can then charge more.

I’m happy to pay and I’m gonna go to her rather than 15 other illustrators who are just doing all the other stuff. So I think that’s a really powerful example. Michael, do you have any examples of that?

That sort of thing?

Interesting. I mean, my own personal brand example is one. And while you were talking about that, I was sitting there thinking, you know what, makes her unique isn’t just the service that she’s doing that that’s niched, it’s that she or anybody can start opening up and sharing their own loves with the world.

I, Tom and I did this, it’s kind of this, in one of our podcasts at some point, I started talking about the things that I’m interested in. You know, I love sharks and I love cheeseburgers and I love, I have a shark Pinterest board that has all kinds of cool shark photos and things. And I don’t know why, you know, probably growing up in the era of Jaws movie, made me get some interest in sharks.

But I can’t tell you how many people messaged me after hearing that podcast saying, wow, I can’t believe it. You’re a designer, you love sharks and you love XYZ things, me too. And all of a sudden, this is how you’re finding your, oh, it was probably in our true fan episode, Tom, that we talked about this, but it’s opening up and sharing some of those kinds of insights all becomes part of your brand.

These are all become these little branded elements. Tom mentioned bobble heads and things, or him playing the guitar. I’ve got a guitar in the background.

I’ve got R2-D2 back there. I’ve got the Millennium Falcon in the blueprint thing and the flux capacitor, and there’s little nerd things.

I noticed that, but what’s that thing on the far right-hand side? Like, it’s got horns and stuff. It’s silver, not that side, the other side.

It’s a silver bowl head thing, and it’s got some of the words from my agency hanging on it.

I’ve been staring at the whole podcast thinking, what the hell?

I can’t take my eyes off of it now. Mike, can I just say how I perceive your niche? Superb.

Yeah.

Because for me, often the power of a niche-

Wait, is this gonna be positive or negative?

A little from Collomate. No, I’m kidding. But for me, a lot of niching with regards to personal branding is the referrable sound bite, and that’s where it’s so powerful, right?

It’s like, what is the one thing where you can put someone in a nutshell and tell someone else who’s a good fit? And Mike, in my eyes, is just like the freelance designer agency guy through and through, which is great because whilst I had a freelance career for a number of years, it was nowhere near the scale of Mike. He’s obviously gone very deep in terms of, he’s written books about that, he’s done a course about that, he’s deeply committed to that.

So, so often when I get questions about freelancing, I’m just like, Mike, go check out Mike, he’s the freelance guy. And I’ve done that so many times as well with Jacob, previously and historically with him being the logo guy and now more brand strategy and stuff. But I haven’t gone deep in those things, I haven’t really niched down in the same way.

So the number of people where I refer them to both Mike and Jacob, because that’s my referrable sound bite. And where you’re kind of struggling in terms of a niche is when you don’t have that, you have nothing that anyone could refer you to anyone else, they wouldn’t know what to sum you up as. I think that’s where it’s too vague and where you’re-

And do you think sometimes people don’t know how, like we’re going back to the point that we’ve sort of touched on before, like sometimes unless you take the time out or you’re forced in some way to look within, it’s hard to define. Like it happened to me when basically I’d sold an agency, I went into corporate world for a bit, I left corporate world and I came back out and I realized there was a restrictive clause in having sold my agency that I couldn’t practice design. So I’d always sort of saw myself as a designer.

And so I was looking at my skillsets thinking like, what do I do? And I got asked to consult on some stuff. And so that really meant I looked within my heart, like what actually am I?

And why are they asking me to consult? They’re not actually asking me to consult because of graphic design. They’re asking me to consult because of strategy.

But more than that, what is the output here? And the output was alignment. That’s why they were calling me in.

They wanted some workshops to bring their team and align their team. And it was kind of like, it took me like 13 years to figure this out, but like my kind of space was in that alignment space, like adding energy in a room, having a beard and being British and slightly humble, but also being able to take the mick out of myself and make it fun and get people to have conversations around storytelling and design thinking in ways that they’re not used to. They’re used to PowerPoints and Excel spreadsheets.

And suddenly you come in, burst of energy, you’re talking about stuff they never heard of before. It wasn’t that stuff though, it was the alignment that they were looking for. And once I found that, I was like, right, that’s my thing.

Like, so now I push that all the time.

When you say alignment, do you mean you aligning with their values and personality, or do you mean you getting their brand aligned?

Yeah, so first and foremost, it’s usually, well, I know this podcast isn’t about me, but I’ll just share a little bit. Like, usually it’s, I work with leadership teams who are not aligned, right? They’re all running in different directions.

And the CEO or a sponsor is kind of upset about that. They want people to align. And brand becomes like the Trojan horse.

The brand strategy becomes the Trojan horse to get them all pulling in the same direction. And that has got value and that’s got money attached to it. But if I said, oh, I do graphic design, that perhaps wouldn’t have such a healthy price tag to it because it’s a real business problem that needs solving.

So I guess I throw that back into the mix and sort of talk about personal brand. Like, is it worth, do you think, digging deep when you go through these exercises asking the big questions? If also you think, well, where’s my sweet spot?

Like, where am I at my best? Where am I actually delivering something of value? Where are people banging on my door for me rather than somebody else?

For me, that was a clue. What do you guys think?

Sure, Tom, could you draw a Venn diagram for us?

Jacob loves my Venn diagrams. Yeah, I think that’s great. And part of that self-awareness is not just the personal introspection, but it’s working out, you know, what does the market value in me the most, as you just alluded to.

And all of us have a varied skill set, right? It’s not just one thing. Matt, you mentioned graphic design.

You’ve almost put that to one side there and you’ve focused on what has the most commercial viability, which is super smart. And I’m just a huge fan of when you find that thing that ticks all the Venn diagram boxes, Jacob, in terms of like, you know, you love it, it’s commercially viable, the market definitely wants it, you’re passionate, et cetera. When you find that thing, I just think lean fully in, right?

So when I try and work with people with defining their personal brand or whatever, I think just own it, right? Like every brand touch point then should align to it. All the copy on your website, your bio section, how you introduce yourself, your proposals, the aesthetics of your brand, but everything should align to scream, in your case, Matt, I’m the alignment guy.

And there’s literally some people like actually, will rename what they’re doing and go slightly cheesy and be like, I’m the alignment doctor. And then suddenly, people are like, damn, we need the alignment doctor over there. And he just helps our friends company out.

We’re so misaligned. We just launched that.

Get a white coat and you’ve got your brand visuals.

I also believe in burning the boats, you were alluding at. Eventually, for me, I say, lean into it, check the market likes it, start making progress, then cut the rest off. So I don’t do any graphic design, I don’t position that at all now.

To be fair, I was never a great graphic designer anyway, so it was probably a good thing that I found some other thing. Kind of burn the bridges. So then what I mean by that is, exactly what you say, on your positioning, you don’t even talk about the other stuff you can do.

You just talk about the thing that adds huge value.

Go all in. Yeah. Mike, do you agree?

Go all in, or go home. I love it.

Yeah.

Yeah, of course, Tom asked if I agreed with that. And of course, you know, that’s, but I think that it’s, we keep dancing around this, the services we offer, and is that, that’s only one piece of what your personal brand is. You know, so if this podcast is about personal branding, yes, what you do is part of that, but it’s only one little part of that.

And I think, you know, if I was thinking where do we take this conversation from here, it’s getting back to, okay, yeah, Matt, you’re the alignment doctor, which you’re now branded as, thanks to Tom. You’re the alignment doctor. And, but why would they choose, why would they choose you to be the alignment doctor versus all the other alignment doctors out there in the world?

And the reason they choose you, and you mentioned this at the start of the podcast as well, is this idea of truth or trust as well. So they’ve gotta believe, somebody has to believe that you are the right choice for them compared to everybody else doing that same service. And what leads to that, a lot of it is personal branding.

A lot of it is positioning yourself in a way that you can resonate and connect with the people that you’re serving in a way that’s unique, that makes you stand out compared to all the rest. So how do we do that? What are the steps to creating your personal brand?

Maybe we should go down that list. What’s the list for somebody on creating your personal brand? What are the steps they should take?

Defining is the first step, figuring out who you are. At least trying to jot some ideas down to see where things do overlap. If you write it down, you’ll get some ideas.

I think that would be the first place to start. What would you lead into next?

I would research all the other people that compete in the same space as you. So you write down, Jacob starts and writes down all the stuff about him that is unique, that his own perceptions of things, his skillset that he has, the things he loves, the things he’s passionate about, all of this list of stuff about Jacob. And then you gotta go and start looking around the marketplace and say, okay, where do I fit in relation to all the other people that love all those same things?

What is it that can make me unique compared to them? So it’s a competitive research effort that would go in next, I think.

I think that’s great. Like, why am I different in this space? What makes me different is the big question.

And I think the other one is, well, once you’ve kind of carved out your point of difference, then it’s kind of like a reasons to believe. How do you substantiate that kind of exercise? And that’s something you can build over time.

You know, we’re doing a podcast now. You know, that’s, I guess, if you’re looking at the alignment doctor, you know, he does podcasts. Like, that’s kind of a thing, Tick.

You know, you might get credentials, awards, testimonials. You might run an event. You might do a lot of stuff on your social media.

All of these things become reasons to believe, and they have an accumulative effect, don’t they, over time? Because you build up that trust. So that basically, at the point that somebody actually contacts you for work, you don’t have to sell yourself anymore because they already trust that you can do the job and they already know what you’re about and they want you.

So, and there’s only one of you. So they go for you, Michael. They go for you, Tom, because that’s all they want.

They don’t want anyone else. They want the cat girl. You know, that’s it.

So that would be my say. Reasons to believe.

That is how I’m known at the weekend, the cat girl, yeah. That’s how I refer to you.

Yeah, no, I love that. I think it’s spot on. Have you guys noticed this as well?

I really enjoy with celebrities I follow and great personal brands. I love just watching them grow over a period of a decade sometimes. And I’ve really noticed it’s kind of like that slow compounding, if it were on a graph, and then they do something like big and career shifting, and it could be launching a podcast that blows up or something and it almost jumps up to the next level.

And then they tick along for a while, and then they launch, they get on like a TV show or whatever it might be. And you can see the same thing with like big established celebrities. It’s like they just pull on a certain lever that kind of blows things up.

Have you seen that? It’s just, I find it fascinating to watch other people’s brands develop, and I have nothing to do with it, and I just sit back and kind of watch it unfold.

Somebody mentioned Joe Rogan. Oh, you mentioned him with Elon Musk or whatever. Joe Rogan’s a great example of that.

A bit character in a bunch of movies over time. A UFC, ringside announcer guy. Didn’t he do one of the reality shows?

He was a host of the reality show. Fear Factor. Bounced around on these things, and then he lands on doing this podcast, and all of the stars start to align, and now what is he known for?

Well, he’s got one of the biggest podcasts in the world, and found himself, and I think that this goes back to something we were talking about earlier, is this development of your personal brand is something that takes time. You’ve got to figure out you. You’ve got to figure out who you are.

I understand myself a lot better today than I did a year ago, because I’ve spent so much energy trying to develop and share a personal brand, but where am I gonna be 10 years from now? And I’m gonna know myself better than I can even dream right now, after another nine or 10 years of doing what I’m doing and being on shows like this that make me think, how does this all apply to me? That’s what I’m thinking through all this.

And you see somebody, I think Joe Rogan’s a good example, Tom, of watching somebody bounce around until they finally find their thing.

Well, you just got the Spotify acquisition, right?

Yeah.

That’s one of those jumps up, where it’s like, oh, next level.

Exactly, next level. Next level. So I think that that’s something for the listeners of this episode, let yourself off the hook a little bit to know that you don’t have to have it all figured out today.

Start where you are, define what you can right now, look at the competitive landscape right now as it is, try and position yourself in it in a unique way, but keep doing that process over and over and over again every quarter for the next 10 years and you will be astonished. You’ll be astonished at where you are. It’s an iterative process of self discovery and discovering your own personal brand and then what you share from that as well.

Can you just throw yourself on the floor because that was a mic drop moment.

It was.

There you go, I think we’re done, that’s it. The mic has been dropped, I love that. Just a couple of other things I just wanted to throw into the mix.

What do you think about, like a lot of listeners will know, I’m big on, I love storytelling. Like how do you see storytelling fitting into the way that we think of ourselves? Any thoughts on that?

Yeah, I think it’s one of the most memorable things you can do as a brand because humans inherently connect with stories more than some kind of awkward corporate elevator pitch kind of thing. If there’s a real heart behind it, people like a story arc. And so I was actually thinking about this earlier, like as we were recording and thinking, God, I haven’t been doing a good enough job recently because I’ve done so many interviews now where they say, tell us your story and you kind of get bored of saying it, right?

But the people that do this well, they really nail it even if they say the same thing 500 times, they really get that story down. And for me, some of the things which really draw people to me are the fact that I burn out her endlessly and hospitalized myself. We’ve done a few interviews recently, Mike, where I haven’t even mentioned that.

I’m just like, yeah, I started pretty young. I did a bunch of stuff. I got a company and now I’m doing this.

And I just skip over that because I’m like, can we get into the conversation? But the story is so powerful. If I really position that well and it’s this emotional entrepreneurial roller coaster or I’ve sacrificed my health and put my whole life on the line and kind of pulled through it and clawed my way out, that’s the story that I should be telling and we all have our stories.

So yeah, like personal notes myself, embrace the storytelling more because that stuff really works.

Yeah. And I actually did a TEDx talk over a decade ago and it was pretty much my only public speaking gig that I’ve ever done at TED.

Wait, wait, just set the bar high.

Yeah, I haven’t done one since. It terrified the hell out of me. But the story there was that I got kicked out of the States because I lost my visa.

So I went to Canada, couldn’t get back into the States. I had to fly home to Australia, but I really wanted to be living and working in New York. So I overcame all these things, got a new job and actually made my way back to New York and stayed there for another five years.

So that story has done wonders for me and I still have it on my website today. But it just shows that you have to overcome these other skills and that is huge rollercoasters and you have to overcome it and you can use that as your advantage as well.

And sorry, just quickly, what’s the alternative to a story? Pretty cold, right? It sounds like some awkward resume.

Like, my name’s Jacob, I’m a real go-getter. I’ve got five years experience in this. Like, people don’t care about that.

They care about your story, the person behind it.

Totally, totally. What’s your big story, Matt?

What’s my story? Oh, we don’t have time for that. We don’t have time for that.

But no, no, well, I know, I genuinely believe in storytelling. And I think there’s, you can research typical plot lines. You can look at Campbell’s hero’s journey and figure out how you fit into that.

I think everybody, if we’re honest, the psychologists tell us that we kind of have a story, a pre-written story in our own minds of our life, right? And our expectations. And we kind of write it in our adolescence of where we think we should roughly be.

And if life adheres to that, we’re kind of satisfied and happy. But if life doesn’t adhere to that, we have dissatisfaction and we’re looking around for things to help plug that gap. And so I think you’re right.

I think storytelling is crucial, particularly if you can connect your story with your ideal customer’s story or your audience’s story. So for me, very briefly, I talk about truth and I talk about I was a dissatisfied designer, always being asked to create a veneer for something that I knew was not true behind the scenes. And so that then led to me kind of exploring and going up as it were the value chain and eventually entering the boardrooms to do the difficult job of trying to align people around the truth and then hold them accountable to that so that it’s true.

So that’s kind of a story that then, happily ever after everybody is true. And then we all feel, breathe a sigh of relief and the tension is gone and everybody loves it. And if that resonates with you, then, and I connect the up or down play it or whatever you want and rift off it, as you said before we came on air Tom, in terms of an expression rifting off each other, like you can do that.

So once you’ve got a beginning, middle and end and you get that simple and it’s authentic to you and it’s true and there’s something about it that you know will connect with your target audience. I think that’s super powerful for your personal branding. What do you think Michael?

What do you think about storytelling in this context?

Yeah, I think it’s great. It’s one of the things that makes us unique and that’s the beauty of a personal brand or of branding in general is all about creating a unique place in the marketplace, in the world, in the perception of the customers. You look at two competing brands, look at Nike and Under Armour, head to head competition.

Now Nike, does Nike think that Under Armour is their competitor? Nike’s so far down the line compared to Under Armour that they see them probably as a budding challenge, but not as their competitor, because does anybody really compete with the brand power of Nike? But Nike, but Under Armour on the other hand, sees Nike as the thing that they want to achieve, but both of them are trying to kind of occupy the same market position.

They’re all about physical empowerment, overcoming challenges, you know, Under Armour has the rock, the bull branding that they have there. There’s just so much overlap in those two brand positions to the detriment of both of them perhaps. So maybe it’s just because Under Armour is trying to take some of Nike’s position.

My point is, is that storytelling is a massive differentiator. It’s a massive differentiator. Do you know the history behind Under Armour and how their business got started and what their unique position is in the marketplace?

I don’t.

I don’t.

Tell us, tell us, no.

I don’t know, I don’t know what it is. This is to illustrate the point.

I was on the edge of my seat then. I was like, come on, tell me the story.

Yeah, just someone Wikipedia that, really.

This is to the point of storytelling. There’s a story to tell there that could probably differentiate Under Armour from being perceived as a Nike wannabe. But I don’t know what that story is and you don’t know what that story is and we’re all branding people and we don’t know what that story is.

I think it was like a giant dinosaur egg looking thing and it cracked and the rock was inside wearing Under Armour.

That was a big moment for Under Armour, for sure.

Wow, yeah, not small.

But that’s the point. I think if you go back to storytelling, it is such a unique differentiator between you and all of your competitors is what your own personal story and journey is. And everybody has one.

To go back to where I was talking at the start there, other than a brand new startup, not a startup that is one month in, a brand new conceived hatched idea doesn’t have a brand story yet. So you gotta start defining what that story or what that brand message is gonna be. But we’ve gotta embrace our unique position, our unique story, because it’s a huge differentiator and a huge manifestation of your personal brand.

Tom, you got something.

Yeah, something popped in my head as you were saying that. So to illustrate Mike’s point, who am I? So I was born in the former Soviet Union, and then I helped my dad’s liquor business grow from three million to 60 million.

Didn’t take long, right? And all I did was start telling a story.

I love we’re dropping Gary Vee.

Thanks, man.

That’s what John does every single day.

I had to get it in there for Mike, but like all I did, I said, I don’t know, 10 words or not many more than that. Telling the start of a story and immediately Matt knew who I’m talking about.

A great example, powerful piece of branding and Gary Vee has done a magnificent job of building a personal brand, being authentic, being truthful, all the stuff that we started this podcast talking about. He has done that down to the every other F-bomb is his dialogue, just completely open and transparent with who he really is, not hiding anything, not faking anything, and we all know his story. Any entrepreneur who has interacted with him more than 30 minutes probably knows the Gary Vee story because it’s so intertwined in his personal brand.

So that was, I think, the question, Matt, how does storytelling play into this? It’s everything on personal branding. It can be the core essence of your personal brand.

It can be your brand, it can be your personal story.

On the other spectrum of personal branding from Gary Vee is Will Smith. I know you had an interaction with him, Janda.

Yeah, so cool.

Yeah, so yeah, we were on the beach in Kauai. We go every summer other than coronavirus summer, sadly. But we were taking our kids there all these years and a couple days in a row, this beach spot that we go to, Jada was there.

I didn’t really recognize her the first day, but I did the second day. And then I thought that night of the second day, oh, if she shows up again, I’m gonna go talk to her on the beach this time. They were taking their daughter surfing at this little spot we go to.

And the next day, instead of Jada, it was Will who brought their daughter to go surf. And he was standing on the beach, like five feet away from behind our beach spot, our camp spot on the beach. And I was out in the water and I looked up and my middle child was running to me.

He was like, dad, Will Smith’s here. And so I was like, let’s go get a picture with him. We start walking back to the beach camp of ours and I start getting my camera out.

My wife is like, don’t you go talk to him. Don’t you go talk to him. Let him have his vacation.

And I was like, I said, okay, honey, I’ll do that while I get my camera out of the bag to go take a picture with Will Smith. Anyway, I waited about 10, 15 minutes until my wife got in the water with our youngest child. And then as soon as she walked away from the camp, I was like, okay, boys, let’s go talk to Will Smith, told my older two boys.

So we’re walking up, we’re walking up the little path and I’m thinking in my head, please be who I think you are. This is what I’m thinking about Will Smith. I’m like, please don’t be a jerk.

Please be nice to my kids because I had my two older boys there. One was about 14. The other one was probably 11 or 12 or something.

I’m thinking, please let this be a good experience for them. And I walked up to Will Smith. He stands up from his lawn chair and I say, hey Will, can we get a picture with you?

And he says, absolutely. He reaches out his hand to shake my hand. I say, hey, I’m Mike.

And he’s like, nice to meet you, Mike. And then I introduced my son, Max. And he’s like, I say, this is my son, Max.

And he says, oh, great to meet you, Max. And then I said, and this is Mason. Oh, super great to meet you, Mason.

He shakes hands with everybody. And he was absolutely everything that you would hope him to be. Personality, outgoing, friendly, accessible, all the things that Will Smith has built in his brand over the last 40 years almost, 30 plus years, that he’s been a celebrity icon.

And he was all of it. So it was, I think it’s such a great example of being truthful and letting your brand be real because you do hear the things of some of these celebrities that have a certain brand, and then you hear about somebody meeting them, and it’s just a train wreck of an experience. I sit there and I think, oh man, such a wasted opportunity, but then it starts to build their brand as that kind of person.

And Will Smith understands himself, understands his brand, and it went all the way down to just an interaction that I had with him on the beach, and such a great example of being that authentic, truthful person through and through.

And I love that story so much, storytelling, guys, case in point. But equally, this is branding in action, because Mike, I’d imagine over the years, you’ve probably shared that awesome experience with friends and loved ones and all kinds of people, right? Probably hundreds at this point have come in contact with that story.

I remember seeing it on your Instagram, as I think Jacob did. So that’s probably thousands more right there. There’ll be thousands of people gonna hear this episode at some point.

And so you’re looking at maybe… Exactly, it’s billions. You’re looking at maybe 10,000 people that will now have collectively heard that story.

And you’ll probably share it on another podcast in the future and so on. So it could end up being tens of thousands of people that have now got a slightly more positive perception of Will Smith because of him spending 10 seconds shaking your hand and being nice. Exactly.

How crazy is that? That’s branding in action. And I guarantee he’s met thousands of other people in his life that have had a similar experience and they’ve told 10,000 people over the years.

And there’s probably just millions of people. I mean, think about it. Everyone thinks Will Smith’s a great guy.

That’s my perception of him. But it’s probably, you know, it’s not just the content he puts out and the platform he controls. It’s the ripple effects of every interaction he’s ever had.

And that is part of branding.

Even how he doesn’t swear or doesn’t use profanity. It’s like another thing that’s ingrained in me. It’s so different to everyone else.

Yeah.

So we’re walking away from him, just to finish out the story. And because it makes some of the point that Tom’s making here. We’re walking away from him.

And I take like three steps back down the path toward our beach site. And then I think, you know what? I got to tell Will Smith, he’s doing a good job.

So I turned around and I took another step or two back toward him while my boys walked off. And I said, hey Will, thanks so much for being a great role model. And thanks so much for being real and making this a good experience for my kids.

And he slapped his heart and he said, I’m trying man. And I said, no, it’s really, it’s hard in your line of work to do that. When you have people talking to you all the time and scrutiny and things.

And anyway, so I said that to him and it probably came from this mindset of, man, I’m so glad he was authentic. And he understands that this one little sliver experience right here is the perpetuation of his brand to millions of people out there. These little micro interactions that they have are what build a brand reputation.

And I think going to the point of this podcast, how do you personally build your personal brand? The exact same way. Now, the people that you interact with may not be people with thousands and tens of thousands or millions of followers, so your brand will perpetuate slower, but it is the exact same way.

It’s through one person having this experience with you, them sharing what their experience was with you with someone else, and all of a sudden you start to build a brand reputation through all of these little micro-interactions. And that is something that pushes me every single day on Instagram and replying to my DMs and replying to comments and getting on podcasts and things because it’s all just the perpetuation of my personal brand through multiple people all over the world.

I think that’s awesome. I think that’s absolutely bang on. It’s about adding value, isn’t it?

Every step of the way, you know? And, you know, when you can do that in a meaningful manner, I think that, you know, as we talked about, has this accumulative effect, absolutely spot on. So thanks so much for sharing that.

I think that’s wonderful.

All right, I think we’ll leave it at that unless there’s anything else. We really went all in on that. So thank you, Tom and Mike.

It was a pleasure having the best buddies on the podcast.

So, it’s been awesome.

Yeah, I really enjoyed it, guys. Thank you so much for having us on.

So if you are looking for Tom or Mike, you can find Mike at morejanda.com.

Yes, on social media and michaeljanda.com.

Which is really annoying.

morejanda.com.

I always try and find you on Instagram because I search all my friends by name and I type in Mike and nothing comes up. And I’m like, where the hell is Mike? I’m like, oh, it’s more.

It’s more Janda.

And I’m embracing the Mr. More thing though. It’s coming. It’s coming, Mr. More.

And I’ll try to write morejanda.com. Does that work?

Yeah, morejanda.com. I own it. I can’t remember if I referred it over, but yes, it will be.

Definitely have to.

If this airs, it will work.

Good, good. And Tom Ross, he is Tom Ross Media on Instagram or designcuts.com for his community marketplace, which is awesome. You should definitely check that out and listen to the podcast BizzBuzz, which is brilliant.

There’s a ton of value from this guy. So definitely go check that out.

Thanks so much, man.

Thank you.

Bye guys.

So fun. We’ll talk to you soon.

Happy personal branding.