431. Branding Secrets Your Firm Needs to Scale with Rory Vaden [Encore Edition]

The scoreboard of media is not accuracy, the scoreboard of media is attention. That's Rory Vaden, renowned keynote speaker, New York Times bestselling author and the co-founder of Brandbillish Group. That's why a lot of people who are experts, they go, "Well, I feel stupid because I don't have a lot of followers. You don't eat a lot of followers. You're not in a media model, you're in a trust model. You don't want to cheapen that just for more followers." I'm Michael Mogul, founder and CEO of Crisp, the nation's number one law from growth company. I've built my business through practice, not theory. Crisp started which is $500 to my name and has grown to over eight figures in revenue over the last few years, earning a spot on the ink 500 lists of the fastest growing private companies in America. Our approach has been to take everything we've learned about generating massive growth within our own organization and help the country's most ambitious and committed law firm owners do the same for theirs. In each episode of this podcast, I sit down with innovative market leaders from the legal industry and beyond to learn from those who thrive in the face of adversity, challenge the status quo and define what it means to be a true game changer. Today we're revisiting one of our most popular episodes from the podcast where I sat down with Rory Vaden to discuss why personal brands aren't just for YouTubers and TikTokers, the leaders can develop and maintain trust with their audience over time and why reputation precedes revenue. You don't need to cheapen your brand, you don't need to cheapen your expertise, you also don't have to do dancing videos on TikTok. You can just teach what you know for free because people don't pay for information, people pay for application. That's coming up on the Game Changing Attorney podcast. Before we begin today's episode, I want to remind you that we aren't beholden to any sponsors or run any ads on this podcast. This allows us to present all of our episodes raw and unfiltered. I'm not going to push any made-to-order meal services on you or try to save you any money on your car insurance. That being said, I have one small request. If you receive any value from this podcast, please give it a five-star review. Pay the fee so we can keep this podcast free. Welcome to the podcast. It's an honor to be here. I love your whole business and what you're about and your reputation precedes you for an effort. I appreciate you saying that. As you know, you've got a pretty diverse background. You're the co-founder of the brand builders group. You're a best-selling author. You're a renowned keynote speaker. I'd love it if you just open things up. You can share a bit of that journey that led you to where you are today. I've been infatuated with success and influence really my whole life and I would consider my area of study, the psychology of influence. Part of that started from the lack of influence that I had and my family had growing up. I was raised by a single mom. My mom got pregnant when she was in high school. She had my brother. Few years later was divorced from his dad. She actually had two abortions. Then she had me and then my biological father was gone six months after I was born. She was the single mom, two kids, no college degree in her early 20s, trying to make ends me. But we always had a lot of love. We had a lot of faith and I started wondering, growing up, why did some families have money and why there were some people so influential and how come some people got into nice schools and got better jobs and had bigger homes and nicer cars and where did that all come from. I did martial arts when I was young. I became the youngest black belt in Colorado to ever get beaten up by a girl when I was 10 years old. That's a true story. Then I got involved in direct sales. I was going door to door 14 hours a day, six days a week through grad school, through undergrad and grad school. But I made about $250,000 in my summers doing that and used that to start our first company, which was a sales coaching business straight out of grad school. Drew that to eight figures. We had about 200 team members sold that in 2018. During the way I had become a New York Times bestselling author when I was 29 years old and then I was the youngest person in history to get inducted into the professional speaking hall of fame. And I had a TED Talk Go viral in 2015. That was called How to Multiply Time, which was based on my second book. And so when we sold our company in 2018, the sales coaching business fully expected to not work for a while, but I had a friend named Lewis House who I had met because when my first book hit The New York Times, I was on Lewis's podcast and he was, he were the same age. And I said, Hey, you should write a book too. And if you want to know how we pulled this off, I'll share it with you. And we became friends. And then we lost touch with each other. And the day that we exited our former company, Lewis called us and said, Hey, I've been growing, but I need some help. I'd love to have your brain on the strategy of my personal brand. And so in 2018, we kind of took Lewis on as just like a side project. Well, we were a part of the team that helped him go from 30 million downloads to 500 million downloads in two years. And he was the one that said, this has to be your new business. I know so many people who are mission driven messengers is what we call them. People who want to make a difference in the world, they don't care about vanity. They don't care about ego. They care about making an impact, but they have no idea how to create a message, how to create books, how to create podcasts, how to create emails and social media and, and, and, and, you know, automation infrastructure. And so brand builders group was born, which we'd ever planned on doing. And now we provide personal brand strategy for those mission driven messengers. And it's from newbies, a lot of professional services we work in all the way up to John Maxwell's The Client of ours, Ed Mylets, The Client of ours, Eric Thomas, ET The Hip Hop Reacher, Amy Porterfield, Jasmine Star, you know, Jim Quick, like so, so many Ryan Sirhant is big in the real estate world. And here we are trying to help mission driven messengers become more wealthy and well-known by teaching them how to build and monetize their personal brand. I love it. I love it. I want to dig in the personal brand. So for somebody who's listening, I mean, I'm sure they're familiar. The majority of our listeners are entrepreneurs and business owners. I mean, I'm sure they're familiar with the business brand, but why, why personal brand? And I'm, I'm also asking for those listening because obviously I'm, I'm a big believer, but just for somebody who's just not familiar with the concept of building their own personal brand, why is that important? Yeah. So let me give you some data points. I know you have a very intelligent audience and we are very data driven. And so one of the things that we did is we invested about $100,000 in conducting the first national research study on personal branding. So it's called Trends in Personal Branding National Research Study. We went out and we asked Americans, all of these questions related to this. And we found that 74% of Americans say they are more likely to trust someone who has an established personal brand. 74% and when you stratify that data down by generations, we know that for millennials, it's 85% and for Gen Z, it's 79%, which means that this trend is going to continue more in the next 20 years where people are making their decisions based on the personal brands. And a lot of times, Michael, I think when people hear personal brands, they tend to think, oh, that that's for speakers or coaches or authors or tick tockers or YouTubers or podcasters. And so we actually dug into that and we asked the question, well, which industries does it matter most for someone to have a personal brand? And some of the data behind this is absolutely shocking because the very industries that you wouldn't think would matter, but they do matter. There's a really big reason why. So this was the question we asked, how important is it to you that each of the following have an established personal brand? So the number one profession, two day that people say they want to have an established personal brand is their doctor. 61% of Americans say they want their doctor to have an established personal brand. Number two is their employer. 59% of Americans say it matters to them that their employer as an established personal brand that they know who they are. They can see who they are in real life. Number three out of all industries, according to the general population of America is lawyers. Only eight percent of Americans say they want their lawyer to have an established personal brand. Next down from that is financial advisors, bankers, insurance agents. And here's what we discovered. It's really simple. Even though on the surface, we all think, oh, personal branding is for YouTubers and tiktokers. In reality, it's not the higher the requirement for trust in your trade or profession, the more more important having an established personal brand becomes. And a lot of that comes down to understanding what a personal brand is, which we now define based on the data they came out of the study, that people think of personal branding as like, oh, that's social media, or it's your website, or it's your fonts, or it's your logo, you know, it's like your colors. And to us, we go, no, this is much more fundamental than that. The way that we define it as a personal branding today is simply the digitization of your reputation. The number one way that people are monetizing their personal brand today is not information products. It's not brand deals. The number one way that personal brands are monetizing today is they're just using their personal brand to drive leads into their existing business for the thing they already do. That is the fastest path to cash. It's the most effective one and it aligns up with the data. So for your audience in particular, which I have never been in front of a group of just lawyers like this having this conversation, it's fun to do it because it's like it's hyper relevant to the way that y'all operate into the future of how this, you know, at least the data says that this industry is headed. I'm curious, how does somebody know if they have an established personal brand? Is it the kind of thing that if you have to ask the question, you probably don't? Everyone has a personal brand because everyone has a reputation and I really want to make anchor that connection for people to go, you can't ask the question, do I have a personal brand? That'd be like saying, do I have a reputation? I mean, it's like, is it by default or by the time? Right. Yeah, it's just, is it the one by design? Is it the one you want to have and is it one that a lot of people know about? A lot of people think they have a revenue problem, but in reality, reputation precedes revenue. If I don't know about you, I can't buy from you. And so this is an vanity game. This isn't like a fame game. This is nothing about that. It's going, you can't serve people if they can't find you. In many ways, you'll know if you have an established personal brand by how many warm inbound leads are you generating? One of our frameworks that we like to talk about is something that we call she hands wall. In any vertical, in any industry, there are, there's two groups of people. There are those who are unknown. So they're struggling with obscurity, right? That they're not recognized in the lexicon or in just like the general population people don't know them. Then there are the people who are well known. They have notoriety, right? So these would be Oprah, the rock. Also like Tony Robbins or Mel Robbins or Gary Vaynerchuk or Bernay Brown, people who are recognizable. And in between these two groups is this huge invisible wall that we call she hands wall because we named it after Peter Sheehan, who's a colleague of mine who originally kind of gave me the initial structure of this framework. And then we've adapted it to personal brands, but he didn't name it after himself. We named it after him just in homage to him. But the way this works is what most people do who are unknown. They're on one side of the wall. They look at the people who are well known and they try to emulate what they do. And so someone goes, I want to build a personal brand. So they look at Gary Vaynerchuk, right? Or Tony Robbins and they go, oh, Gary Vaynerchuk talks about all these topics, right? He talks about Web 3 and music and sports and entertainment and social media and business and investing and Tony Robbins has conferences on like date with destiny, which is like relational and it's business mastery and then it's money mastery and it's personal development, unleashed the power within and he's got a book on health. And so we talk about all these topics because that's what they do. And we go, oh, I'll talk about a lot of topics. And then there's a lot of platforms we're trying to be on, right? So we're going, oh, I got to be on TikTok and Twitter X and Meta Facebook and podcasts and YouTube. So we're on all these different platforms. And then we have all these different audiences that we're serving because it's like grandma's following us and our buddies from high school are following us and my colleagues at the office and my current customers. But then also there's future customers. But then I also have like this side hustle, hustle maybe or I have this hobby that I'm interested in. And then one of the biggest mistakes that people do is they hear what I think is some of the dumbest advice there is on the internet, which is you should have multiple streams of income. Maybe who got rich got rich from multiple streams of income. Everyone who got rich got rich from having one amazing stream of income. And then later they diversified and created multiple streams of income. But we all start out and go, oh, let's let's launch a course in a membership site and certifications and assessments and let's be a speaker and let's host a mastermind and all of these different things. And so what happens is we're talking to too many different audiences about too many different topics on too many different platforms with too many different revenue streams. And what happens is something that I actually talked about in my very first book, Take the Stairs, which is if you have diluted focus, you get diluted results. If you have diluted focus, you get diluted results. And so what happens is they're trying to break through the wall. But what really happens is they bounce off the wall and they create more of the very noise they are trying to escape. Now if you go, okay, well, how do you break through the wall? Well, the single best piece of personal branding advice I've ever received, this came from a gentleman named Larry Wingett. And Larry said the goal is to find your uniqueness and exploit it in the service. And so what our process does is we take people through this introspective process to help them figure out what is the one problem they solve for the world in one word. What is the one audience they're best suited to serve and one phrase? How do they solve that problem in one sentence? And what is the one revenue stream that matters above all others inside of their business? What is the and what is their uniqueness and you breaks through the wall on that one thing? If you think of this metaphor as like an actual concrete wall and let's say you're swinging a sledgehammer, if you hit all these different spots on the wall, nothing happens to that wall. You're just going to get frustrated. You're not going to damage the wall at all. But if you hit the same spot over and over and over and over at first it's frustrating. But then the paint chips, then the wall cracks, then a little divot carves out. Then there's like a whole hole and a section. And now all of a sudden you hit it again and again and again and then you break through the wall. And once you break through the wall, you can simply reach through and the whole wall comes crashing down. So we're helping people figure out what is their uniqueness and how do they zero in on that and go all of their focus in that one moment because you know it's like yes Gary Vaynerchuk talks about a million things. But in the beginning he talked about one topic, wine on one platform, YouTube. Yes, the rock has a tequila line and a clothing line and men's facial products and he's an actor and he's a comedian and he's an investor. But in the beginning he was a wrestler and he broke through the wall by being a professional wrestler. That is true for everybody. I love it. I love it now. For somebody who's thinking to themselves like yeah you know what I really need to build my personal brand but I don't have really one today at least not one by design. I'd like to have one tomorrow. What advice do you have for them in terms of like how long this is take right? I'm sure that the results are it depends and it varies just depending on what they're trying to do and let's say their professional services business but it's certainly not an overnight type of thing. Yeah, I mean it's just like how long does it take you to build a great reputation in real life right like in the offline world in some ways it's that that same thing. Now the biggest personal brands in the world in terms of the ones with the most audience, the biggest followers, the biggest podcasts. They're not necessarily the most gifted. They're not necessarily the most talented. They're not even the ones that are necessarily most divinely orchestrated. The people with the biggest personal brands today are the ones who have the most sophisticated systems. They have the most sophistication on their content creation and they're measuring everything and they're optimizing everything to reach more people. It's much more of a science than it is an art. We make it into a science and layer the science on top of the art but the science is much more predictable. Everything from becoming a New York Times best selling author. I mean we've helped five people do that last quarter. It's not through hacks and gimmicks and cheats but it is through understanding how does what's the mechanisms that drive that? What's the volume of people that are required to buy a book for that to happen and then how can we create enough attention in a short enough window to create that effect and then all of a sudden you go, oh well I'm a Hall of Fame speaker in a New York Times best selling author and I've got half a million social media followers and five million downloads on my podcast and suddenly go, oh I guess I'm one of the biggest personal brands in the world and people pay me to speak on the biggest stages in the world. You're events. You guys put on one of the best events in the world and you get some of the best speakers and you pay them because they're these people but there's probably customers that you have that are equally if not more talented than the speakers you pay to be on your stage, they're just not as well known. They might have stories that are just as inspiring. They might be as intelligent. They might have accomplished things that are just as amazing. They're just not as well known, and that is what drives demand, right? So reputation precedes revenue. So that's a long way of answering, you know, how long does it take? It depends on how fast you wanna go. People can move the needle in a year, and that I think is true and anything in your life. I mean, you're one year away from a completely different life. Yes, you go out at hard for 365 days. So, you know, somewhere between one year and 20. Oh, I get to know, I know you mentioned a lack of focus as a pretty calm mistake. What are some other mistakes that you see, you know, leaders and entrepreneurs make when they're trying to build their personal brands and like, what are some things they can do to avoid, you know, some of these pitfalls? A lack of focus is the definitely the number one mistake. Diluted focus, diluted results. A close second, probably maybe a distant second, but definitely second that's far away from whatever number three is, is that they trade their reputation too much for pursuing transactions instead of pursuing trust. In other words, they're chasing vanity metrics. It's amazing, someone will spend their whole life becoming an expert, and then suddenly they go online and they feel like they need to sell every $1.7 E-book because that's what the latest webinar is that they watched. There's a lot of people that make money teaching you how to do that, and that's fine. There's times when a $7 E-book makes sense, but for most of your audience, right? Your intelligent, you spent a life developing genuine expertise that is worth a lot of money. There's a good chance for most of the people listening to this that you'll never sell a course or a membership site or an e-book. You could, there might be reasons why to do that, but the number one fastest path to cash would be to teach your advice for free in small bite-sized chunks and all random miscellaneous order and be focused on automating trust. And then what happens is you go, "All right, let me teach you how merger and acquisitions work." And let me tell you the story anonymously of a client I worked with and here's the things that were wrong with their agreement. And here's the things they didn't flush out. And here's what happened when we litigated the issue. And here's what I've seen in settlement discussions and did it, and when somebody is going, wow, like this person knows a lot about business acquisition and valuation and M&A, when I go to sell my business, who am I gonna call? I'm gonna call this person. You don't have to sell me a course. I don't need a course. I need to just sell my company. You didn't get paid for years of producing all of that content, but you got paid millions of dollars off of one customer who followed you and that you automated trust. And so that's where I think you don't need to cheapen your brand. You don't need to cheapen your expertise. You can just be an expert. You also don't have to do dancing videos on TikTok. You can just teach what you know for free. You can teach everything you know for free, because people don't pay for information anyways. People pay for application. Information is available all over the place. So people aren't paying for information. They're paying for application. They want it done for them. And the more they learn about it, the more they learn how complicated a nuance it is and the more they're like, yeah, I just need to hire someone to like solve this problem for me. So that's what I think you're gonna do is you're gonna drive free calls. So don't cheapen it. So I would say be focused on automating trust. Don't be so focused on short-term transactions. It's long-term trust is so much greater than short-term transactions. And there's something about like in real life, you would never just walk up to somebody off the street and be like, hey, I'm a lawyer. Do you need my services? Or try to sell them something. You would get to know them. You'd build a relationship with them. You would try to add value to them. But yet somehow when we put a camera on people, they feel like they have to go into like salesman mode somehow and start pitching everybody. And it's like, don't. Approach it more with the heart of a teacher and let your reputation speak for itself. Let your expertise speak for itself. And as you do that, people, they will trust you and trust must take place before there's a transaction. And the tools of the day, the digitization of reputation, we just happen to live in the most amazing time in human history to be able to automate trust at scale. - Amen. I'll go up that. One thing I wanted to ask you about, I think we're aligned on this, but I guess we'll see. Once I ask the question is that with how social media has grown, you're starting to see a lot of, I put in quotes like influencers, right, and you see kids that when they grow up, they say, they ask them what they want to be, or a doctor, a lawyer, and they say influencer, how important is it to hone your craft and hone your skills and develop your expertise to be a better thought leader? - Yeah, it's hugely important. There's way too much focus on the widths of our reach. People are overestimating the importance of the width of their reach and they're underestimating the importance of the depth of their impact. Impact is only made by knowing something deeply and being able to really change somebody's life because you have a specific area of focus and expertise. Now, for the YouTubers, for some of them, that is their expertise is media, is their experts at attention. So that is their expertise is they make money by eyeballs. And this is always been true about media. I mean, this is one of the ironies of media is that being successful in media has nothing to do with accuracy. The scoreboard of media is not accuracy. The scoreboard of media is attention. And media is about getting attention. Like literally, their business model is they get paid for impressions. They get paid for eyeballs, which means they need more attention. How do you attract attention? Well, typically, if something is just accurate, that's not gonna attract attention. That's not newsworthy because it's just accurate. What attracts attention is the superlative, the exaggeration, the myth, the scary, the polarizing, the angering. And so that's why a lot of people who are experts, they go, "Well, I feel stupid because I don't have a lot of followers." You don't need a lot of followers. You're not in a media model. You're in a trust model. You're in a truth model. You're in an actual business. You don't want to cheapen that just for more followers. Like you don't need millions of followers to make millions of dollars. I mean, this is interesting, right? Like, brand builders group, we got zero and eight figures in five years. The second time we've done this, no investors, no outside capital, just like you, right? So I love that about you. And it's by serving a vertical in a deep way. Look at what you guys do. You serve one industry. One, do the principles that you teach apply to other industries? You betcha. Do the business processes you teach apply to dentists and to chiropractors and to accounts? Sure they do. But what you want to do is not ask, who are all the people I can help? The question you want to ask is, who can I serve in the deepest way? How do I find my uniqueness like right now? Is there a shortcut? And the answer is yes. Now we didn't know this shortcut when we started the company. We actually only realized this after we had worked with a couple thousand customers. And we noticed Michael a pattern that started to emerge. And it was really when we were scaling our team and we were trying to teach our team of strategists how they could start coaching our clients so that we could help more people. And we stumbled across this realization that for all of us, for every single one of us, you are most powerfully positioned to serve the person you once were. That is where your uniqueness almost always lies. It's almost always somehow connected to or attached to the person that you were somehow in some way at one point because you understand that person. You know what it's like to be that person, right? Like when someone says, oh gosh, I'm aspiring to be like a best-selling author or to just be an author at all or to be a speaker or to build a personal brand, I go. There's pretty much no one else in the world that can help you more than us. Why? Because I've spent my entire life living that dream, that nightmare, which figuring out how to turn that nightmare into a dream. And you have too. There is something in your life like whatever you've done. So the question is, what challenge have you conquered? What obstacle have you overcome? What setback have you survived? What tragedy have you triumphed over? Therein lies, and the answers to those questions, therein lies the intersection of your uniqueness. That is where your uniqueness lies. And when you do that, it's magic because people feel it. They feel a difference when they're talking to you versus someone else because you're not pretending, you're teaching them, you're serving them, you're helping them go down a path that you have already personally walked versus the pretenders who are online just attracting eyeballs by saying things that are sensational. So not only can you do it without doing that, the secret to doing it is without doing that. And it is serving that one vehicle. And that's why what you guys do is, you're such a great example of that. Like you go, one. audience that I can serve, which audience can I serve in the deepest way? That's the secret to breaking through the wall. And Rory, how do you define success? I'm just curious. My favorite definition of success actually comes from John Maxwell's. John is a client of ours. We actually just did an event together recently for him and, you know, I spoke at it with him and Wilga Dara and Rich and Ruben, really great. I've always respected John and we shared the stage a few times. But the most impactful thing he's ever said to me, he said to me the first time I met him in a green room, which was like 20 years ago. And I asked him this question and he said, my definition of success is having the people who know you the best respect you the most. So that's my favorite definition still to this day. For me personally, I would adapt that slightly like if you really want to go there. I am a hardcore Bible thump in Jesus freak. I am. That's just what I love apologetics. I love challenging the evidence and the scrutiny of the life of Jesus of Nazareth. And I've spent, you know, decades in my personal life diving into that. I used to basically be agnostic and through challenging the evidence and investigating the archeological support, the academic support, I became a believer. So, you know, to me, it's that idea of like, you know, well done, my good and faithful servant. I really am at a stage in life where it's like, I'm not playing for the applause of the audience or people or online. We're not the richest people in the world, but we certainly are not in any type of, you know, anywhere near any financial need. Will I be able to hear those words, you know, well done, my good and faithful servant? And that's what brand builders group, even though we're not a nonprofit, we are a for profit business. We're technically not a Christian company like technically we operate in a secular space. We have Muslims and atheists that we work our employees of our company. But for AJ and I, my wife is my business partner. She's the CEO. I'm more, I'm more like the CMO. We feel that God told us help my people be heard in a world full of noise and drama and exaggeration and superlative and polarization help my people be heard. So that's the mission that we're currently on. And that's why, you know, we serve, we serve mission driven messengers. They're not all Christian, not all of our clients are Christian. We have all different faiths and but like all of our clients are mission driven messengers. So it's not that they don't care about money. They do care about money. It's just that money is subservient to the mission. They care about revenue, but revenue is subservient to reputation. They care about income, but income is subservient to impact. And I would say that is what's winning is not so much what's the success of brand builders group. It's really what is the impact when you add up the success of all of our clients and you go, we view our success not as like the success of our company like our growth, our profits, but as the going, if you add up all the people that are being reached by the people that we are advising and coaching, I mean, it's billions of people, which is like, pretty phenomenal. So that's the game that we're playing and it it's honestly the only thing that excites me is when watching one of my clients succeed. That's where I get my kicks these days is when one of our clients does something amazing. It's like it's fulfilling. So anyways, that's the that's the game we're playing right now. Anyways, and always we come to a close this being the game changing attorney podcast. What does being a game changer mean to you? I think a game changer, even as we use the term internally, what comes to mind is like we have this litmus test of how do we know if we hired a good person? The litmus test is do we notice an immediate difference and immediate impact from the person being here? If there's not an immediate noticeable impact, we should let them go. They're not the right person. But I'm talking within days, we should feel and notice, oh, something is different. This person is changing things, doing things, streamlining things. And so I think to me, a game changer is that someone who makes a noticeable impact. Somebody who alters the state of what would have happened in their absence. I hope you enjoyed revisiting this episode of the game changing attorney podcast with our guest, Roy Vaden, and have gained new insights from our timeless conversation. If you found this episode valuable, here are three free ways that I can help you grow your law firm. Number one, download the first chapter of my book, absolutely free at gamechangingatourney.com. Number two, you can shoot me a text at 404-531-7691 and I'll answer any question that you've got for me. And finally, number three, if you can leave this podcast a five-star review, it'll help us gain access to more influential thought leaders and bring their lessons learned here to you. For more information on our interview with Roy Vaden, see the show notes for this episode in your podcast app or visit legalpodcast.com.