Personal Brand vs Reputation w/ Matt Essam | Ep 429

**Chris Do** (0:00)
When you attach your name to something, that thing becomes valuable and people will buy it. Like your name means something, okay? Again, it has to be outside of what you already do. Everyone has a personal reputation, not everyone has a personal brand.
My mom has a reputation, she ain't got a brand.
Welcome back everybody, this is episode 2 of this ongoing dialogue with Matt Essam. He's a friend and a person who coaches for the Futur community. We've been talking a lot about personal branding. So you haven't done so, it's really important that you go listen to the previous episode. We'll include the link to that episode down below in the description. The reason why is because in episode 1, we set the general framework for understanding or having the proper mindset around building a personal brand. We went through probably more of what it isn't versus what it is. And so naturally, we've taken a short break here and we're back. So Matt has a lot of thoughts and questions. So I hope to continue to dive down deeper into this.

**Matt Essam** (1:01)
I think I would love to pick up the conversation around content, because a lot of people, myself included, aren't 100 percent clear on what content to be creating in order to build the right kind of personal brand, but also to have an impact at the same time. And also, I guess the other thing is like, how do you know where to draw the line between what to share and what not to share? I've always equated in my mind when you talk about personal branding, or when I hear people talk about personal branding, it's like, I have to be like a Hormozie, or I have to be a Chris Do, or I have to be a Steven Bartlett before I get any kind of level of success. So I guess to start with, it's like picking up from where we left off.
Can you just speak to audience size versus kind of impact and income, and how personal brand is related to those three things?

**Chris Do** (2:02)
Yeah, let's break it down. I don't think there's any connection between audience size and income. Somebody could be the most unknown person, do $100 billion a year, and we would never know about them, and they'd be very successful, but we would kind of argue that they don't have a personal brand. So part of the personal brand is having the reputation that precedes you in life and in on social.
Now, everybody that knows you has an impression of you, and even the brista at the coffee shop who sees you every once a day has an impression he's kind, he's not kind, he's very curt, and that's part of your brand. And if we were to somehow get the 100 people that know you, your family, your friends, your partner, your coworkers, and we kind of assess what they all think of you, we would get some sense of your brand. What we would do is we throw away the edge cases where people are like, he's super generous, but only two people have said that, or he's a total a-hole when only two people said that. We kind of look at the thing in the middle. And that's you having your personal brand, and everyone has something like that. But we won't call it personal brand, we just call it, you have a reputation. It's not until this reputation exceeds your immediate primary and secondary circle of people that you know, that we start to say like, you have a personal brand.
Now, I'm going to borrow a little bit from Martin Neumeyer, and I will, as often the case when we talk about branding, is when enough people come to a similar gut feeling about who you are, then you have a brand. And that's deliberately vague and nebulous, because what is enough people? We don't know.
But we know it when we know it, we can tell. And so when your reputation precedes you, people are talking about you when you're not in the room.
Now, you could be the poorest person, by the way. You could be the poorest person, broke living hand to mouth and have amazing personal brand. They're not connected. Conversely, you could be the most unknown person, be the richest mother after in the world, and have no personal brand. They're not connected concepts. And we have to decouple these ideas.

**Matt Essam** (4:00)
So you could personal brand and personal reputation be interchanged, as in like, they have the same meaning almost.

**Chris Do** (4:07)
Well, there has to be some differentiation because everyone has a personal reputation. Not everyone has a personal brand.