Becoming A Business Rockstar With Personal Branding - Mark Lack - FHR #309

Why Dave Decided to Talk to Mark Lack:

From Pro Paintballer to Personal Brander Extraordinaire, Mark Lack has developed lots of skills and strategies that just might be of interest to you. From how to establish your own brand with a budget to how you can score interviews with the celebrities in your industry, Mark and Dave hit it all. This podcast will help you on your journey to perfecting not only your brand but also towards fulfilling your dreams. As Russell always says, “You’re only one funnel away.” Now with this episode you could only be one play away.

Tips and Tricks for You and Your Business

(1:30) Pain Pushes Until the Vision Pulls

(5:00) Your Personal Branding is Your “Trojan Horse”

(9:24) Do You Create Your Audiences?

(11:28) A Personal Brand that I can Afford

(13:08) Become the Next Celebrity with Mark’s Celebrity Secret

(18:20) Why Dave Loves Mark’s Business

(20:03) You Can’t Ask If You’ve Never Given, Just Try and Ask Chase Bank

(21:54) Shows = Success

Quotable Moments:

(1:59) “It was so cool being like a glimpse of a rockstar in my own paintball world. But Monday through Friday I was miserable at school. I just couldn’t wait to get out and go back to the place that made me feel significant.”

(5:14) “Direct response marketing is how we get started with people, but as soon as you get started with people that personal brand becomes extremely critical.”

(12:14) “That’s the best part and what I love about Entrepreneurship: we don’t need qualifications, we don’t need any of that stuff, we just need results”

(21:49) “Interviews is like one of the secrets to a lot of big names success. How many big name people have their own show

Other Tidbits:

People rarely go onto social media to get sold something, BUT they do go onto social media do buy someONE

There is never any better dollar spent than the one that helps your omnipresence

Transparency helps you to develop more LASTING and TRUE fans

Important Episode Links:

ShortenTheGap.comFunnelHackingLive.com FunnelHackerRadio.com FunnelHackerRadio.com/freetrial FunnelHackerRadio.com/dreamcar

---Transcript---

[00:00] Welcome to funnel hacker radio podcast, where we go behind the scenes and uncover the tactics and strategies top entrepreneurs are using to make more sales, dominate their markets, and how you can get those same results. Here's your host, Dave Woodward.

[00:17] Everybody. Welcome back to funnel hacker radio. I'm your host, but most importantly, the person who I'm bringing on happens to be the personal branding guy and he has his own TV show, business rock star. So without any further ado, mark, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. He rock. I'm so excited to have you. This is been a ton of fun. We were just talking about, uh, he, I actually used to live not too far from where you're at right now. And one of my favorite places in the world down there in southern California. Indeed. Beautiful view of the ocean up on the mountains. I'm jealous. It's where it is here in Boise, but that's how I want to make sure we kind of dive right into this. First of all, congratulations on business rockstars. That's a massive, massive TV show for those of you guys have flown Delta.

[01:03] You've probably seen it on there. If not, they've got podcast, they've done a ton of crazy things and mark's had the opportunity of interviewing Louis, some of the world's most profound and influential entrepreneurs and everything else out there, but the cool thing for me is kind of your whole story. I was a kind of go through some of this stuff prepping for the podcast today and one of the things mark I loved was, I think it was the quote from Tony Robbins that you use that pain pushes until the vision pulls us. If you don't mind to expound on that a little bit and then I'm going to dive right into this whole personal branding thing. Yeah. So you know, for me it's one of those things in life where I think you hit that moment where you just know you're going to make that change and if you're not there yet, you're probably experienced that at some point.

[01:47] But for me, it was when I looked at my life and I realized Monday through Friday was miserable in school and the weekends I felt like a rockstar because that was one of the top professional paintball player traveling all over the world. It was so cool being like a little glimpse of the rockstar in my own little tiny paintball world. But Monday through Friday I was miserable at school. I hated it. I just couldn't wait to get out and go back to the place that made me feel significant. And so what I realized was I had to figure out how to make money to Friday, phenomenal. And I went on youtube and Google because I'm so lucky that I grew up in an era where the Internet exists and I can do that. And I came across Tony Robbins, of course, right? Trying to improve your life and get motivated.

[02:27] You're going to cost the guy. And so I just started watching his videos and he said so many incredible things. You've got to be come the best version of yourself. You've got to always grow. You've got to contribute beyond yourself. And one of his quotes as well as, you know, pain pushes until the vision pulls. And so for me, I never actually had a vision for the life that I wanted to create. And so it wasn't until I decided that I thought the coolest thing ever would be to be a professional athlete. And so weirdly enough I got into paintball doing it and I only wish it was a different sport or I would have made a lot more money. But, uh, it ended up being paintball. I learned a lot of lessons, but I, as I started studying Tony Robbins, that led me into entrepreneurship and to this whole new world of how you can literally create the life you want impact so many people through business and have an uncapped earning potential and the entrepreneurial world.

[03:16] And I was like, oh my gosh, I want to become a pro at that. Like created this vision for my life. And that ended up pulling me into the direction that I am today. And most people have to push themselves, right? Pain pushes. You have to push yourself to do the mundane tasks that you don't want to do. Oh, I gotta go to the gym today. You have to push yourself, motivate yourself with the pain until you have a vision. I'm going to the gym everyday now having to get into the best shape of my life because I have a vision. I'm creating the most successful abundant team and business that I possibly can because I have a vision and the vision pulls me. It motivates me to want to become my best. So it's powerful quote and it's led me to creating the life that I have.

[03:55] Oh, I love it. It's funny, last night I was with the boys and my wife and the, uh, they were watching the new rocks. A shell. The titans. Yeah. Yeah. I love that thought. I was watching it too, these crazy guys on there and all of a sudden we felt so it was kind of like watching a rocky movie or something like that. That's my vision. I'm going to get on there. I'm going to do this. I think it's really cool because I believe that's so important these days, especially with. You may have mentioned that in your earlier life kind of feeling bullied and everything else, just not fitting in and I think that's the hardest thing for a lot of entrepreneurs. They don't really have a circle of friends that supports them. They don't have people who are there encouraging them and so there's that, that aspect as far as the need for the vision and I think it ties in so well to what you become so good at and that's that whole personal branding thing and I think the vision and would that personal brand.

[04:46] I've seen it here with click funnels and some of the things that we've been doing and and the large that vision gets, the easier it is to create a personal brand around where you want to go. And so with that I'd like you to of share a little bit about. Because I hear all the time, you know, branding and I was one of those guys I grew up in the direct response marketing things. You know, who cares about branding. Branding doesn't matter, right? It's all about direct response marketing and it's been fun for me to see how important that branding has actually become a. I think when I look at marketing these days, direct response marketing is, is how we get started with people, but as soon as you get started with people, that personal brand becomes extremely critical. Again, I call it, I call it the Trojan horse.

[05:25] It is. I'll get into that. Let's, let's dive right in and they don't care to hear from me. They want to hear from you, so let's dive right in. So the reason why I call it the Trojan horse and you hit it on the head, it's like direct response marketing is the ideal scenario. Puts something out, see the data instantly in real time and know if it's working. We're branding is kind of like you're really betting on the long term success. You're not going to get any short term benefit from branding. So trust me, I come from the direct response marketing world, probably half the books behind me, our marketing books, and because who doesn't want to put something out that they created and get instant gratification or at least results to make a pivot. I'm all for that and I think a lot of people should start there, but I also think we live in this new era where you know, nobody's going on, for example, they have no one goes on facebook with a credit card and says, Hey David, do you want me to get you anything?

[06:16] Right? Absolutely right. Hey, by the way, I'm going on youtube. Did you want anything? No one says that. And so although billions of dollars are, you know, invested from advertisers and people like us in the direct response marketing space, we get to make a lot of money online hopefully. And it's fantastic, but we all know that it's incongruent to why the person's going on there. And so you and I can go to church and somebody could come up and try to sell us something. And if they were really good, we feel good about it. And we would lie, but the regular person who tries to go into the church and sell people, it's going to be weird. We're going to look at each other like why is he selling this at the church? But a really good person would make us feel good about it and we would like that the process.

[06:58] And so most people, when they see ads on social media, they hate it because they're not on there for ads. Most people are very upset and in fact, I'm sure you know, you can see all the hate and the comments on ads. I'm getting so much hate and all my comments on ads from half of them. Right? And so you got to have thick skin. My point is people don't go on the platforms to have ads put in front of them, let alone to buy something. Now, obviously if you build a funnel and click funnels, you can do it really effectively. And clickfunnels has played a huge role in our success because of the back end systems and processes. But the reason why I call it the Trojan horses, because people go on social media for content, so here's the crazy thing, a business and we can agree with this, is that a business is going to be as successful as the problems it solves, and so if you can solve bigger problems at scale, you're going to get paid more money and businesses solve problems through products and services.

[07:55] Right now when you go on social media, you might have a problem that a product and service can solve for you, but you're not on there to buy and so you have to be really good with your process and your campaign and your retargeting, your funnels to get them to buy and to do it in a cost efficient way. Here's the crazy thing. You can also solve a problem with content and you can do that with a personal brand because it's arbitrage. It's, it's the they're on. They're seeing a person with a person's name, not a company name. They're seeing a person with a person's name just providing content with no links, no pitch, no call to action, no nothing. If you're interested in weight loss, I could sell you products on weight loss or I could just give you education on the right food to eat the right exercises to do the right habits and mindset shifts you have to do to commit to the goal, and I could give you all of that information for free so as you start to know me like me and trust me because I've been giving you education and content for free and I've been paying to put it in front of you just like I can pay to put an ad in front of you, but the difference is you receive my content so much better because it's educational in nature, not salesy, and then I can pixel you and I can retarget you with more content and as I see you engage more with my content, I can create a custom audience bucket and only retarget my advertisements to the people who have been consuming my content.

[09:23] I love that. I think that I'm going to stop you right there because I think I love what you're talking about because I. I mean, we become a content mill and we joke around all the time here in the office, well, you know, what's the cost of the b roll? It's all about. Got to find some way. How can we set this up? So because it doesn't. It has to be engaging, but I think the part that I love what you said is so important. Session for people who are just getting started. We're, we're funds are tight. A lot of people throw all this money to facebook and they get frustrated and it doesn't work. I'm like, it doesn't work because you don't have the right audience and so if you can create the correct audience by retargeting them and creating that bucket of a look like audience and things where people have actually consumed your content and who people who are like those other types of people, it allows those ad dollars to go so much further. So I think that's great. I love that Trojan horse approach

[10:11] between our clients and our own companies. We've tested tens of millions of dollars and the advertising and the content marketing space and we've found that on average content, meaning you uploaded on facebook or instagram and you pay the platform to put it in front of a targeted audience, but you do not add a link that takes them off the platform. Soon as you add a link, it's considered an ad and it costs 10, five to 10 times more to run an ad than a piece of content so we can cut up a 62nd clip from this interview. I could upload it on instagram or facebook and I can put it in front of anyone on the Internet and it'll cost five to 10 times less to just have people see that and then as they start to know me and I can reach. So if you and I had the same budget and you only ran ads, hopefully you know what you're doing or you're going to go through your budget quick. I could spend half my budget reaching 10 times more people and then only run my ads to the people that saw me at scale.

[11:10] I love that. I think it's the part where people miss the boat so much. We're under a lot of people are just producing a ton of content that is just content for content sake and I think it's one thing that you've. I love the content. I see that you're producing out there. It's high, high value, you know, even if you take a look at your facebook page on impact and influence, they're just the interviews and the things that you've done with people and you're providing so much value out there, whether it was whoever was with, um, but I think that the part that people need to understand is you can provide massive content without having to spend a whole bunch of money to create that content. So if you don't mind, talk a little bit about how can a person build their own personal brand on a limited budget but create massive content. Has fantastic

[11:54] question. One of the best things you can do when you're starting your personal brand, and this is really anything. This is what most people try to aspire to get down the road. But it's so funny. And entrepreneurship. I think a lot of people wait until they feel qualified, they wait until they feel like they have permission or an invitation, and that's the best part about what I love about entrepreneurship is we don't need qualifications. We don't need any of that stuff. We just need to get results and so what you have to understand and how this relates to personal branding is the best thing you can do with a personal brand to collapse five years of time into your first year of personal branding authority positioning, how to become the expert, truly attend in one year as you align yourself with people who have 10, 20 years of credibility and authority, and you do that in the form of a show.

[12:44] Just like you and I are doing interviews now. I align myself with Daymond John from shark tank, grant Cardone, Russell Brunson, Gary Vaynerchuk, Tony Robbins, Tai Lopez, Lewis House, and all the other amazing men and women that I can name that you most of those names you might recognize because they've built 20, 30 year personal brands. Very successful. So if I align myself with them not selfie at an event with the backdrop and a name tag, I'm talking about aligning myself with them in an intimate environment and the form of an interview where we're having a dialogue and sharing a conversation and value for an audience after doing that enough times, sometimes even once, I will be then perceived as the next celebrity just because I've been around all the celebrities and you've seen me with all the celebrities and I'm the next person. Right? And so you can become so big from your own show, but how do you get a big celebrity person to say yes is your first guests.

[13:39] Now I don't think maybe you should get your first guest is a celebrity. I think you should get good first with some smaller interviews, but when you're ready, just so you know the ace up the sleeve anytime you want, the way that you get a big person to say yes to your show is you say, grant Cardone, Russell Brunson, whoever. I'd love to have you on my show and whenever it makes sense this year that you want lots of pr and awareness because it's all about timing. For the big name people. It's all about timing. If they say no, it's because you ask during the wrong season the wrong time, so don't ask. How about next month? Say when this year all big dogs have their year mapped out. When this year do you have something coming up, a book launch and event, a charity, anything that you want lots of attention and pr and awareness on because when, when so and so grant cardone or Tony Robbins, you've ever comes on my show, I'll guarantee they get 200,000 views from entrepreneurs, from college students, from millennials, from baby boomers and no one ever asks the question with how big is your audience?

[14:40] Where are they going to lose? Because they're like, wow. He picked a number and set it, and so when you get the interview, you upload it on facebook and instagram and you just pay money. Promote the interview to the targeted audience of your choice and then plugging engagement pixel on it, so all the people that see you with Tony Robbins or Gary Vaynerchuk, grant Cardone, you can retarget them with your next big name, interview and your next big and memory, so eventually you become omnipresent. You're everywhere in the same industry. Have the same people and you become a big fish in a small pond. Wait a minute, you're dave, the guy who interviews all the big name people. I love your show and then you retarget them later with your products and services because now they know, like, and trust you. Think Ellen Degeneres, Oprah Winfrey, all those people have blown up from just interviewing people and having a show and then it creates your content and in an authoritative way and then it forces you to have to promote it to lots of people and you're probably more comfortable investing the money to do that because you know it's going to be valuable when it's you with an authority figure than just promoting your own content to that many people.

[15:44] So that's, that's something that'll blow your brand up.

[15:49] I love it. I think the part people have to understand is there's no better dollars to spend than to spend on producing content like that and actually promoting that content. If you, again, if you can go to someone. I love that as far as I'll get this in front of 200,000 people. They're like, holy smokes, how are you doing to me because I just say, okay, a million and I got it. Trust me, I got to shell out the bucks, but like

[16:11] I got the interview and I'm building a brand and over the long haul that will pay me 20, 30, 40 x in the long run. So

[16:21] I love it. I think. I hope people are, as you guys were listening to what I love that you said right there, mark is over the long haul and I think that's. You have to understand you're in this for the long game. Everyone's out there just trying to make a quick buck real fast. Yeah. That never ever works on branding, but more importantly you can't. I think that you're going to get to the status that you want in life for the significance or whatever term you want to use without playing the long, blonde game. I don't care. You got to put in your 10,000 hours on here what term or an analogy you want to use. To me, that's the most important thing is to realize you're in this for the long haul, so awesome.

[16:55] I try to tell people, look, if you want the achievement and the destination, that's fine. I think we all do in some level, right? We all, we want the achievements, the destination. That's what keeps us going. You got to set the bar and keep growing and keep going forward, but I think that if you fall in love with the process and you fall in love with the journey, then any achievement at any destination will happen. Like all these guys talk about scaling your business to millions, but what they don't talk about is that scaling is a byproduct of building, testing, reviewing the data and optimizing and never stopping. Building testing, looking at the data and optimizing scaling as the byproduct and all these guys tried to jump straight to scaling. They think they're going to build something. Once I'm going to build one click funnel, I'm going to test it and I'm going to just scale this thing to millions.

[17:41] It's like come on guys, you have to build tests, look at the data and optimize constantly nonstop. And then scaling happens as a byproduct and you might scale for a week or a month and then it's going to draw and you got to go back to building and testing. And so yeah, I mean everything. Branding, even direct response marketing, click funnels. It's all a long game and everyone can have their, you know, eight figure, you know, Comma club like you have behind you if they just play the game long enough. Like I was telling you, I said I'm going to have that in 2020 no questions asked because I just, I'm in the game. I'm in the process. I mean the journey and everything

[18:17] and I think that's the part I love so much about, especially about what you teach them, what you do is you're actually teaching exactly what you do on a regular basis and for me that's where that can grow and see comes in, especially from a branding standpoint. One of the great things about social media these days is people can pick out a fake real fast and if you're not authentic and you're not transparent and you're not congruent with your message, you might get people at first, but they will not stick. They will not engage. They will not buy the. And I think that for me has been some of the fun stuff as biggest social media's become as the transparency that's out there. I think the other thing I love about what you said Mark, and that is when you're doing those interviews with people, you're providing value to them and it's.

[19:01] It's cool for me to see, yeah, you've interviewed a whole bunch of people. More important than that. You've actually developed a friendship with them and that to me is where the long game really comes into play. It's a matter of who you know and and who knows you and and the value that you provide to them. It's so much easier to go and do something with someone after they know that you've already sent them a ton of value, that 200,000, a million, whatever it might be, but when they know that you're playing the long game and your planet for them, man, it just helps you so much for what helps you sleep better at night, but more important that it allows you the opportunity to really grow something that's got legs because when the, when everything falls and it doesn't work, those relationships, at least for me, I know I've fallen back on some of those relationships multiple times when things didn't go exactly the way I want it to, so I love that. That's like

[19:49] if people could understand you have to add value first. Right? I love this analogy, like looking at relationships like a bank account, like you couldn't go up to a person or a bank account and ask for a withdrawal if you've never made a deposit first. Like if I walked into chase bank that I don't go to and I'm like, let me get some withdrawals. They're like, you don't, you've never made a deposit. And like that's how people treat relationships is they're like, okay, how am I going to get something from this person and for my business, for my thing, and I look at it the opposite way. Like if you're going to add value, there's so many ways to do it. The obvious one for successful people just pay them money by their program, by their thing, go to their charity and donate. Give them a quick deposit in the form of cash because that's actually deposited, right?

[20:31] Like, you know, likes and comments and shares. Those aren't, those aren't deposited at the bank. So just give people money if you can afford to, if you can't, the next commodity that you know, big name, people in business world and celebrities are willing to exchange time for it, right? They'll change, they'll exchange their time for money. Everybody will some price or they'll exchange their time for attention because attention is the new commodity. How much does superbowl charge for a ten second commercial, $5, million bucks, 10 seconds, because so many people are watching. There's so much attention and on social media, we're fighting for attention. It's costing more and more and more every year to get people's attention, and so if you can just figure out how to get anyone in the world's attention and through the form of a show and then pay money to promote that, it's usually a lot cheaper to buy a million views than to buy an hour of a big name person's tone, for sure.

[21:27] Think of it that way. It's cheaper for me to buy an hour of your time for my show to promote it than it is for me to pay you to sit down with you and talk to you anyways, and it's the same outcome, but an interview is like a backdoor way to make you feel great because I'm at, I'm talking about you and everyone loves to talk about themselves and then I'm edifying you and doing it in a spotlighted way. So yeah, I mean, interviews is one of the secrets to a lot of big name people. Success. Look at how many big name people have their own show. All of them because we all know you can all you can slop. No, it's funny. You know, Russell and I were talking about this multiple times. It kind of goes back to the whole Arsenio Hall thing back on with trump when he was on the apprentice, and I don't know if you remember that whole story nor centennial hall was, was sitting there and he was trying to.

[22:17] Everyone's out trying to raise money and he had all these crazy huge Rolodex, but no one returned his call because he didn't have a show, but when he had a show, the old arsenio hall show years and years ago, everybody would return his call because they knew they were going to get something out of being on a show. Exactly the. That's the part that you need to start and there's nothing better than starting with the show. And I know you've. You've done an amazing job with business rockstars. How in the world did that come about? So business rockstars, thank goodness, has these incredible co founders and investors that have built the whole thing and put it all together and I'm lucky, kind of like a Ryan seacrest of American idol and now k SFM, right? Uh, I get to be the host and the face of the whole show for the primary segment of the show, which is amazing.

[23:05] And then I've been able to, because I think like an entrepreneur structure myself as a partner in the company, help kind of direct the social media part of the business which almost never existed before and then actually make them think about different monetization components from the show that they had never thought of. And now it's led to them looking at the business and a whole different way. We're actually acquiring a bunch of membership companies and doing a roll up in an IPO. Crazy, crazy stuff. I'm not dude, I who's the one writing the stuff like the contracts and the checks. These guys are [inaudible], they're in their sixties and they got multi hundred million dollar net worth and they come from the radio, television space. And so the cool thing is is I get to learn from them from their experience and they're looking at this in a way I never would have.

[23:52] I was like, we should monetize it like this, this, this, this, this. And they're like, that's great, let's do that. And let's roll up and acquire companies and do an IPO. And I was like, okay, this sounds awesome. So yeah, so it's really cool because we get, I get to like, you know, the ying and the Yang. I got like my younger online social media, digital marketing mindset combined with hey, it's a lot faster to just buy a company than to build it and I'm like that's one way to look at it. So we're just buying companies and then building them with social media and online marketing and that's helping us get to our run rate that we want to do before we go crazy though. And most people think of it as just a shop, but it's so much more than that. Started off a branding kinda like clickfunnels.

[24:35] It's so much more than what people probably think. They just think of clickfunnels as I'm having some fun on some acquisitions myself right now. So it's been a crazy stuff. Exactly. Well, as we kind of get close to wrapping things up, I, I know people are going to be dying to find out more of how do they get more from you? What, what's the best way for them to get ahold of you? So whether it's social media, you want to connect with me there, you want to watch a ton of our free content, you want to get free resources and watch some of my interviews, all of that is that shorten the gap.com, Jordan, the gap.com and then you guys have a a course. There's won't masterclass or something. What's that? We've ever, you know, if this fun kind of banter and dialogue has been good for people to choose to tune into and listen to and they want to know more about how they can really position themselves as an authority figure within their industry and then actually monetize that authority.

[25:23] I'm just go check out our website@shortenthegap.com slash masterclass and we have a whole 90 minute free training that we put together. Kind of like you guys have so many different incredible free trainings. We've got one ourselves and it's 90 minutes long and anybody who wants a deep dive on personal branding can check that out. No, I love it. Well mark, I appreciate so much your time today and congratulations on all your success. It's super, super excited. I can't wait to, uh, basically presenting the big award to you, uh, next year at funnel hacking live. You cross the state board. I'd love that. Nothing would make me happier. I'm looking forward to appreciate you coming on here and jam with your tribe and uh, always a pleasure to connecting with you. Thanks Mike. We'll talk soon. Thanks again.

[26:03] Hey everybody. Thank you so much for taking the time to listen to podcasts. If you don't mind, could you please share this with others, rate review this podcast on itunes. It means the world to me. We're trying to get to as a million downloads here in the next few months and just crush through over 650,000 and I just want to get the next few 100,000 so we can get to a million downloads and see really what I can do to help improve and, and get this out to more people at the same time. If there's a topic, there's something you'd like me to share or someone you'd like me to interview, by all means, just reach out to me on facebook. You can pm me and I'm more than happy to take any of your feedback as well as if you'd like me to interview. I'm more than happy to reach out and have that conversation with you so I can go to itunes rate and review this, share this podcast with others, and let me know how else I can improve this or what I can do to make this better for you guys. Thanks.