Enhancing Client Connections and Evolving Your Personal Brand with Jason Barnard | Ep #698
Are you debating the value of building your brand? Perhaps you’re wary of the effort needed to establish your identity, only to feel confined to your business once you become the face of the agency. Our guest today specializes in helping clients effectively brand themselves and elevate their agencies.
He understands the common fears and reservations surrounding personal branding and offers valuable insights into its benefits. Above all, he wants entrepreneurs to understand that personal brands should evolve continually, ensuring that they don’t limit your growth. Tune in for expert advice on cultivating trust and credibility in the industry through consistent branding efforts.
Jason Barnard is an entrepreneur, writer, and CEO of Kalicube, a digital marketing agency that makes your online brand representation irresistible to potential customers. Jason loves to solve the puzzle of how algorithms work and figure out how clients can use them in their favor. In this conversation, both Jasons emphasize the significance of branding yourself to elevate your agency to the next level in the digital marketing space.
In this episode, we’ll discuss:
- Why a personal brand won’t tie you to the business.
- How to build and pivot your brand.
- Communicating your evolving value.
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Jason Barnard [00:00:37]: Your personal brand. You need to take control. You need to be proactive and you need to have the courage to actually start that journey. And it’s a journey that never ends. And if we look into the Digital Marketing SEO space, Google, Bing ChatGPT, they’re all looking for who is behind this company because they’re all trying to figure out who can we trust. The AI, Google, ChatGPT, Bing, Perplexity, it’s a very simplistic child and it needs a very simplistic, consistent explanation. But a lot of people say, well, it’s too much time, it’s too much effort.
Jason Barnard [00:01:08]: I don’t have the time. I can’t invest that time. And truth is, if you don’t, you’re going to lose the game before you even started playing it.
Jason Swenk [00:01:32]: What’s up, agency owners? Jason Swenk here with another episode of the Smart Agency Masterclass. And on today’s episode, we’ll talk with another Jason. I don’t think I’ve had too many Jason’s on the podcast, but we’re going to talk about branding and branding yourself in order to really take your agency to the next level. So, Jason, welcome to the show.
Jason Barnard [00:01:53]: Thank you, Jason. This is going to be an interesting conversation of Jason. Thank you, Jason, please, can you answer this question, Jason. Yes, I can, Jason,
Jason Swenk [00:02:00]: And I found out in the pre show, too, we were both cartoonists. You were more on the animated side, I was more on the newspaper and just the print side. So that was, I don’t talk to many cartoonists. I love it.
Jason Barnard [00:02:14]: Yeah, I mean, I was less. You were in the illustration and scripting side. I just did the scripting, my ex-wife did the illustrations and I wrote the songs and sang the songs. So it was musical cartoons, animating across the web and TV for ten years, a little bit over ten years, we were doing it.
Jason Swenk [00:02:33]: That had to take so much longer than mine. I literally would think of a joke and then I’d write it down and then I’d create a cartoon in like 15 minutes and I was done. I can only imagine my ADD self, trying to like, come up with the script, animate it, do the voiceover, do the same. I’d have been like, no, no, thank you.
Jason Barnard [00:02:53]: Oh, I loved it, bringing all those things together. It’s so many different elements. The scripting, the song, the voiceover, the animation, the illustrations, the games. We made games as well for kids. I love bringing it all together. And what we managed to do is over ten years, we updated the website every single first day of the month with three games, an animation and a song. And that consistency is what made the company, what made the website a billion page views in 2007. It was huge.
Jason Barnard [00:03:24]: We were competing with PBS, Disney, the BBC, and it was obviously quality, imagination, originality, but consistency is what absolutely nailed it every single first day of the month for ten years.
Jason Swenk [00:03:39]: Consistency is everything. I mean, it’s, you can take a lump of coal and with consistency over time, that turns into a diamond, but it’s not overnight. Right? And I think we live in an age where people want instant gratification of. It’s working right away. And I kind of laugh at them. I’m like, you know, because we all see the, the ads to, hey, let me help your agency. I’ll get you leads and appointments and like, guaranteed, blah, blah blah blah. And like, it’s, they think it’s instant and I’m like, no, man, none of that works.
Jason Swenk [00:04:11]: And then you see them weather away, they just go downstream and they kind of die versus, you know, you did that a decade. We’ve been doing this podcast for a decade. We haven’t missed one week and we’ve been, for the past four years, we’ve been doing two shows a week.
Jason Barnard [00:04:25]: Wow.
Jason Swenk [00:04:26]: So, you know, it’s just consistency over time. If you provide value to people and it’s consistent, then, then they’ll trust you versus, I have one good idea and that’s it.
Jason Barnard [00:04:35]: Yeah, no, 100%. It’s consistency and believing in the idea and trusting the process. And that is hugely important. We’re going to be talking about personal branding today, your personal brand. You need to take control, you need to be proactive and you need to have the courage to actually start that journey. And it’s a journey that never ends. But a lot of people say, well, it’s too much time, it’s too much effort. I don’t have the time.
Jason Barnard [00:04:57]: I can’t invest that time. And truth is, if you don’t, you’re going to lose the game before you even started playing it. Once you do start playing it, if you’re consistent, you don’t have to be consistent every single day, every single week. Maybe it’s once a month, but the consistency is what’s going to pay and it isn’t actually as much time investment as people imagine, I think.
Jason Swenk [00:05:15]: If people are not building their own personal brand within their agency, what’s happening? Like talk more about like some things that you’ve seen. Because look, here’s the thing I hear from a lot of agencies to go, well, I rather build the brand. And this is how I was at the first agency. I want to build the brand of the agency, not me. Because if I build the brand for me, then if I go away or I can’t sell it or everyone wants to work with me and I want to build a faceless company.
Jason Barnard [00:05:47]: Well, a faceless company is always going to be problematic because people do business with people, they don’t do business with a faceless entity. So you need to be the face of your company, especially in the beginning and even further down the line when the agency has grown. Having a face doesn’t mean to say that you are the agency. It doesn’t mean to say you can’t step away. It just means to say that people relate to you as a human being and that once you, I mean, for example, we take a company who, like Yoast, for example, Joost de Valk in the SEO world is very well known. The plugin Yoast for WordPress, it’s installed on 30% of all WordPress sites. He was very much the face of the company. That did not stop him from selling the company to, I can’t remember which company he sold it to.
Jason Barnard [00:06:32]: And step away. That’s not a problem when you’re selling into a huge corporation, for example. So I would suggest being the face of your company, a, doesn’t mean you can’t step away, and b, it doesn’t mean you can’t sell. But it serves you hugely well in the short and medium term to build your business because people do business with people.
Jason Swenk [00:06:52]: And if you’re not building your personal brand, you were saying, you know, people are going to kind of go by the wayside. Give us an example of that. Of, you know, let’s say this, there’s someone listening that they’re, ah, Jason, so you don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m going to keep building my agency. But if they’re not trying to show up for their personal brand, don’t they still have a personal brand?
Jason Barnard [00:07:14]: Yeah, we all have a personal brand online, whether we like it or not. As soon as you step into the digital landscape, you are making a footprint. You become present and you cannot hide, and people will find you whether you like it or not. That means that even if you try to stay in the background, people will seek you out to figure out who is behind this company. And if we look into the Digital Marketing SEO space, Google, Bing, ChatGPT, they’re all looking for who is behind this company, because they’re all trying to figure out who can we trust. And at the end of the day, as we all do business with people, the machines are trying to trust the people behind the business as much as they’re trying to understand and trust the business itself. But the business is always going to be represented by the C-suite, the clients, the audience, and their opinion of that business. So at the end of the day, actually, the business itself doesn’t mean anything. It’s everybody else’s opinion of the business and the people behind the business.
Jason Swenk [00:08:11]: Okay, so you convinced, let’s say, three, four of the audience right now.
Jason Barnard [00:08:16]: Right.
Jason Swenk [00:08:16]: Right?
Jason Swenk [00:08:16]: So let’s go. Let’s get into the how, right? We’ve talked about the why. All right, Jason, you convinced me, in order, I need to build a personal brand, I need to be the front face of the agency. And that is being the face of the agency is one of the crucial roles, of the five roles I believe every CEO needs to have. What do you start doing? Is this, I need to post on social media what I’m eating? How much I weigh? How does one go to build a personal brand?
Jason Barnard [00:08:47]: Right. Can I just come back a step and then answer that question? Cause I’ve just remembered, one of the thing is we were talking about moving on from your agency. I’m the face of the agency. You sold your agency. You then have a career ahead of you. That’s not the end of your professional life. If you have a personal brand, you can pivot the personal brand and immediately leap off into a new career. And we have a client who was the CEO of a huge corporation, built it up to be a multi billion dollar corporation, got a huge payoff, moved on and asked us to reposition him as an investor.
Jason Barnard [00:09:15]: And we’ve managed to do that. And so now he is recognized and known as an investor. Although a year ago, he was a famous CEO. So that repositioned and that, I can’t tell you. The pivot is hugely important. So don’t ever forget that you have a career after your agency. Now, to come back to building the personal brand, how? A lot of people say to us, social media, I really, really don’t have the time. I’m not interested. Do I have to do social media? The answer is no, you don’t.
Jason Barnard [00:09:45]: You need to do what makes sense to you and what makes sense to your audience. So it might be podcast appearances, it might be writing articles. It might be social media, it might be being on TV. It depends on your talent set, how you want to be presented, how your audience is going to consume the information that you provide. You’ve written a book, for example. You might want to be an author and be presented as an author and write a book that’s a bestseller on Amazon. Or use the book to leverage your personal brand to build authority. But the book doesn’t actually sell. It simply builds up your own personal authority.
Jason Barnard [00:10:18]: So what we do at Kalicube is figure out which are the best touch points, which are the best formats, which are the best platforms to help our clients understand which priorities they need to set for building their personal brand. And obviously, we don’t say to them, you have to do social media, or you have to write a book, or you have to podcast guest appearances. We talk to them about what they, as a human being, are comfortable with, because there is no point in being on a podcast if you just cannot think of anything to say when somebody who asks you a direct question that you need the time to write it down.
Jason Swenk [00:10:50]: I love that you said that. You don’t have to do anything. You just gotta find out what is the thing that you’re really good at that you’re open to, because you may not be really good at it yet. Yeah, I started the podcast. I was horrible. I mean, if you guys go back, go to jasonswenk.com/1-4. I think we named the first four like that. They were pretty bad.
Jason Swenk [00:11:13]: Amazing guests. And I think we did it over Google Hangout. I literally had a green background, so I look like a Oompa Loompa. Like, the lighting was all bad, the audio is probably shit. But I look at, like, looking back, that was the best thing I ever did. Like, in using another example. So in America, American football is very, very popular. I know you guys call it, you know, what we call soccer, you guys call football.
Jason Barnard [00:11:38]: Yeah.
Jason Swenk [00:11:39]: So I just want to make that clear. But one of the least famous people is the punter, or the holder that punts the ball, catches the ball, right? And he made it to the NFL, was fantastic, was very showy. But afterwards was his second career where he started a podcast. His name is Pat McAfee. He’s one of the most famous people now on ESPN. He started out just doing a podcast, talking about what he knows and what he likes. Built an amazing brand.
Jason Swenk [00:12:10]: All of the companies that you mentioned, Disney, ABC, NBC, all told him to go fuck off in the very beginning. And then he built an amazing personal brand and they all begged him to come back and they licensed his show now.
Jason Barnard [00:12:24]: Right. That’s brilliant. And that’s a really good example of being absolutely sure of what you’re doing, being consistent, keeping going and communicating who you truly are. And that’s the point. As you said earlier on, do what you feel comfortable with or what you know you’re going to enjoy doing. And then it isn’t, I mean, it’s like it’s not work anymore. It’s not building my personal brand. It’s doing what I enjoy doing. And in my particular case, it’s talking to people like yourself about personal brand and how to build it.
Jason Barnard [00:12:51]: And if you search my name, Jason Barnard, J-A-S-O-N B-A-R-N-A-R-D, you will see a phenomenal Knowledge Panel. Google makes me look like a superstar. And that’s one of the lovely tricks to play, is I can leverage the little that I actually have to make myself look much, much, much more famous and much more notable, much more authoritative than I truly am. And if I search your name, you have the author box because you’ve written a book and what you haven’t done is joined all the dots for Google so that it can represent you in the way it represents me. The only difference between you and me is you haven’t joined the dots for Google so it understands which content is you and which content is going to be valuable to your audience.
Jason Swenk [00:13:30]: Let’s talk about that so people can do that. Feel free to use me as an example. What are you talking about with all the boxes? Because we’ve done over a thousand videos on YouTube. We’ve done 700 podcasts on our show. I’ve probably done 300 other podcast interviews. We have the book. So we have so much content, right?
Jason Swenk [00:13:53]: And that sometimes hurts us. So for the people listening, like, what are the dots you’re talking about connecting?
Jason Barnard [00:14:00]: Right. Well, you’re a really, really good example. I mean, I’ve got a phenomenal amount of material out there.
Jason Swenk [00:14:05]: And beat the shit out of me. I don’t care.
Jason Barnard [00:14:08]: Well, I mean, we can actually compare the two of us in one sense, is that my starting point was I was known to Google and to my audience as Boowa, the cartoon blue dog. So when you search my name 15 years ago, it said, Jason Barnard is a cartoon blue dog. And I then set about becoming a digital marketer and an entrepreneur. So I set out to educate Google that I was no longer a blue dog and that it should focus on the digital marketer, entrepreneur. And that didn’t mean removing the content about the blue dog. It meant dominating it with the new information. So I intentionally created a lot of material, podcast appearances, my own podcast, my company, my website, and a book, articles on forbes.com, on Search Engine Land, to create a weight of evidence that allowed Google to understand that I was actually now a digital marketer and an entrepreneur.
Jason Barnard [00:14:59]: And what I used was my own website, jasonbarnard.com, as the hub. I got Google to recognize that that was me talking about myself and what I felt was important to my audience. And that allowed me to gradually move its perspective to what I wanted it to see. And you have a website. I have a website. You have as much information and content around the web as I do. But your website doesn’t clearly join the dots for Google by pointing to all of this content, saying, yes, that is me, and prioritizing by saying, that’s more important than that. This is more important than that.
Jason Barnard [00:15:32]: And across your entire digital ecosystem, which must be massive, I would bet my bottom dollar there is a lack of consistency over time. So what I’ve done, which you haven’t done, is gone back through everything about myself and corrected it to make sure the focus of everything that I’ve done in the past is relevant to what I’m doing today. So if you go to IMDb, for example, where we talk about me as a blue dog and now as a podcaster, I’ve focused on Jason Barnard as an entrepreneur. Oh, by the way, he was a blue dog and a cartoon, rather than Jason Barnard as a blue dog and a cartoon, which was the initial description in IMDb. So to conclude all of that, it’s saying, look at what you have in your digital ecosystem, decide what you want to communicate and refocus everything. And when you refocus it, Google will represent you the way you want and your audience will see you the way you want as well. Because in order for Google to represent you the way you want, you actually have to walk the walk, as it were.
Jason Barnard [00:16:29]: So you have to do the legwork. You have to go in and do it.
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Jason Swenk [00:17:32]: One of the things I did a couple years ago, I thought about, well, how if someone was going to introduce me to someone else or I’m coming on someone’s show, almost thinking about my, almost like a press kit, right? Like what is that summary and is that what you’re talking about of going, you know, like if we’re using me as an example. Thinking back, I wanted to be one of the top resources that agency owners go to when they want to scale their agency. And so I created a press kit, little page. I basically wrote the description of how I want someone to introduce me and sure enough, people started introducing me. Hey, the one of the most sought out authorities in the agency space, blah, blah, blah, blah. Is that where you’re talking about like doing something like that and then making sure you’re going back to all the previous digital content out there and changing that so then?
Jason Barnard [00:18:27]: Yeah. And it’s a huge job and there are two things going on. Number one is it’s a huge job and it’s very boring. Number two is making sure you’ve made your decision about what you’re going to say before you go out and correct everything, because otherwise you have to go back and do it again when you change your mind, which happens all the time. The other is finding it all. So I actually built a machine in 2015 called Kalicube Pro that goes out and finds all of this stuff automatically and it prioritises it according to how important Google thinks it is. And if the priorities look wrong to you when it comes out of our machine, then you know that the digital ecosystem that you have is focusing on the wrong stuff. So we then go around, we can analyze it, we figure out exactly what needs to be done in order to rebalance everything in your favor.
Jason Barnard [00:19:08]: And I’ll come back to your point about what you’re saying. Your Google books author bio says Jason Swenk guides digital agency owners on growing, scaling, enjoying, and eventually selling their agencies. That tells me what you do. It doesn’t tell me what you are.
Jason Swenk [00:19:22]: Explain that a little bit more.
Jason Barnard [00:19:24]: Right.
Jason Swenk [00:19:24]: Like, what would you change that to?
Jason Barnard [00:19:26]: Right. So your subtitle is author. So Google doesn’t understand what you do. Sorry, what you are. Excuse me. So it’s saying he’s an author because he’s written a book, and that’s as far as it can think. If you said Jason Swenk is an agency owner or Jason Swenk is an entrepreneur, or Jason Swenk is an author or Jason Swenk is a cartoonist, that tells Google what you are and how it should classify you. So if you wrote everywhere online, Jason Swenk is a cartoonist and a Digital Marketing agency owner, Google would almost certainly put your subtitle of Cartoonist.
Jason Barnard [00:20:02]: If you start off every single description on every single website with Jason Swenk as a Digital Marketing agency owner, it would start off with Digital Marketing agency owner. It would give you that categorization.
Jason Swenk [00:20:12]: Gotcha.
Jason Barnard [00:20:14]: What you’ve written is how you help people. And that’s great for sales, but it’s not great for understanding exactly what you do. Google’s still very simplistic. In four or five years time, that will change. The AI will get smarter. But right now, the AI: Google, ChatGPT, Bing, Perplexity, it’s a very simplistic child, and it needs a very simplistic, consistent explanation.
Jason Swenk [00:20:36]: And this is what I’ve told people, too, right? Like, no one cares what you do. And it’s never about you. It’s how you can actually help them.
Jason Barnard [00:20:45]: Yes.
Jason Swenk [00:20:46]: So there’s always that balance that you have to figure out in order to, I guess, position you in the right way because I always can’t stand people of going, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it’s just like you’re just talking. They’re talking about themselves. And that’s always felt kind of like, and that’s not who I am either. Because here’s another point, is when I sold the first agency, I was depressed because I sold my identity, right? Because I referenced myself as an agency owner, and now I sold agency. So now I don’t have any identity. And that’s the other great part about building a personal brand bigger than the actual company. But I was still creative.
Jason Swenk [00:21:33]: I still could do cartoons. I still could consult. So then I started thinking about it, and I’ve interviewed Todd Herman, who’s the author of was it Alter Ego? And a number of other really cool books. He helped professional athletes and olympians and that kind of stuff. And the whole idea was, you’re not selling the agency owner because you’re still creative, you’re still innovative, you’re still all these. It’s almost like a verb. And I always, I always.
Jason Swenk [00:22:01]: That hit me after I was like, man, I wish I knew that after I sold the agency. That would have been a year or less depression.
Jason Barnard [00:22:09]: Yeah. And that’s it. I, at one point, was looking at myself as the CEO of Kalicube, which I am today, but fundamentally, I’m an entrepreneur, and that’s an important distinction.
Jason Swenk [00:22:22]: Well, you’re entrepreneurial.
Jason Barnard [00:22:24]: Ooh.
Jason Swenk [00:22:24]: That’s like, right? I don’t think you’re an entrepreneur because you could sell all your businesses, and then you would think, I’m not an entrepreneur anymore. Cause I don’t have any businesses.
Jason Barnard [00:22:34]: Sure. And I could become a musician again. At which point I would change my subtitle on Google to musician by refocusing its attention. And that’s something I think that’s important, is we’re not permanently just one thing, or some of us are, but people will change. People will evolve. Our careers will change. So your personal brand is also something that’s constantly evolving, and you need to reposition yourself on a regular basis. I would say, if you have a reasonably active career, and the person I was talking about earlier on who moved from CEO to investor, that’s typically something that will happen at least once in your career, but almost certainly three or four times.
Jason Barnard [00:23:10]: I went from musician to cartoon blue dog to digital marketer to entrepreneur.
Jason Swenk [00:23:15]: I went from partier to cartoonist to consultant to agency owner to nothing and then agency mentor.
Jason Barnard [00:23:26]: And there’s the huge trick that we’ll be able to play in the future with the AI, Google, Bing, Perplexity. Apple, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, they all work the same. They’re trying to understand who you are because they want to figure out whether you match a particular subset of their audiences or their users, which is the subset of their users, who is your audience. And they need to understand who you are for that.
Jason Swenk [00:23:48]: But really isn’t the hardest thing. And I’ll ask you this. I think I finally figured out who I am maybe two years ago at like, 45. I feel like there’s so many people that have no fucking clue who they are. And so how do you put it out there? If I don’t know who I am, how the hell someone else?
Jason Barnard [00:24:10]: No, who I am, philosophically, fundamentally, in my day to day life and my existence, my existence on earth is one thing. What I’m trying to achieve today is something else, and right now it’s business. 30 years ago, it was becoming a famous musician, playing in a stadium with 60,000 people screaming and shouting for the amazing songs I’d written. And in between times, it was being a comfort and an educational resource for small children as a cartoon blue dog. And I think that shift is something that we can control. And in the future, it’s going to be more difficult to control how these machines perceive us and represent us and match us to the subset of their users who are our audience. But it’s something we can actively and intentionally and proactively do.
Jason Swenk [00:24:56]: No, I agree with that. I like that. I always just joke with people. I’m like, because who I was in my twenties, who I was in the thirties, is so different than who I am now. Like, it’s just your priorities change.
Jason Barnard [00:25:11]: Yeah.
Jason Swenk [00:25:13]: And then I’ve been watching those videos of, there’s this one guy, a young guy, does pretty well on social media, I think. He just goes up to older people, like in their eighties, and was like, what would you tell your younger self? Like, what would you worry about? And it’s the two most common things is I wouldn’t worry about money. No one cares about money, and I wouldn’t care what anybody else thinks about you.
Jason Barnard [00:25:36]: Right, yeah.
Jason Swenk [00:25:37]: Right? And you gotta think, like, in my twenties, it was just trying to figure things out. My thirties I was just like, I want to be liked. My forties up until now, I was like, I’ve kind of gotten to a point where like, I just don’t give a shit.
Jason Barnard [00:25:50]: Right.
Jason Swenk [00:25:51]: I was like, you think whatever you want. I was like, I don’t care. So.
Jason Barnard [00:25:55]: Yep.
Jason Swenk [00:25:56]: But it’s like, you keep acquiring all these things, and I bet when I get to my fifties or sixties, like, why do I have all this shit and just get rid of it?
Jason Barnard [00:26:04]: Yeah, well, I solved that problem by my, in 2000, my ex-wife and I moved to Mauritius. So we got rid of lots of stuff. Then we moved back to Europe, we got rid of lots of stuff. Then we separated and I went off around the world as a digital nomad with my entire life on my back. So I had that whole cleanout, and now I started accumulating stuff again, but significantly less than before. And it’s been interesting because I don’t care about that stuff anymore. I actually care.
Jason Barnard [00:26:31]: What I care about today is the people I love, music and figuring out how Google and these other AI machines function. I find that so fascinating.
Jason Swenk [00:26:41]: You’re obsessed with that.
Jason Barnard [00:26:42]: Totally obsessed. And I’ve got a data set of 2 billion data points that I’ve collected over the last nine years, and I can just dig in and figure stuff out. That’s one of the funnest things I do in my life.
Jason Swenk [00:26:54]: You’re a nerd.
Jason Barnard [00:26:55]: I’m a nerd, yeah. But actually, that’s an interesting point. As well as, as we evolve, we change, we move forwards. And I’ve moved from being a nerd for nerd’s sake to being a nerd to serve other people, to help them with their own self determination in a Generative AI world. So it becomes this mission, let’s say, and just to be really clear about that is I share as much as I possibly can for free because I believe that self determination in the Generative AI world is not something I should keep for myself. If I figure this out, I should share it with everybody. So you can all do it. It seems to me to be important, and it seems to me it’s not very complicated at the end of the day.
Jason Swenk [00:27:36]: No, it’s. And that’s the thing I tell everybody is, like, your value is weighed by how much value you actually put out for other people. If you think about it, the other way of, like, how do I extract out? Like, for example, I thought I had a really good friend a couple years ago, but he was kind of that transactional friend of like, I’ll be your friend as long as it’s good for me. And then when it’s not, I’m not there for you. And then you look at your other friends, you’re like, man, they’re happy for me when I succeed, regardless.
Jason Barnard [00:28:08]: Yeah.
Jason Swenk [00:28:09]: Whether it helps them or not. And so I always tell people to, like, you know, find your tribe, find, you know, a way to put out value for a particular audience. And when you do that, it’s so rewarding. Like, I fell into this business by accident because people reached out, were curious about how I was, in their eyes, successful at selling the agency. That’s what they wanted. And I was like, all right. And then it was kind of funny. It was like I gave them value, but I got so much more back.
Jason Swenk [00:28:39]: I didn’t realize that. And that’s why I, you know, I love doing the podcast. I love chatting with people like you on this, and it’s been awesome. So for everyone listening, you know, make sure you check out Jason’s stuff. And I’d like for you guys to do two things. I want you to think, how do you want people to see you and then start taking some action, looking at some of the old things that are out there and seeing how you can change that. And then let us know how, how that’s working for you on building your personal brand, because I really believe the ones that build the personal brand, you will be so much further along than everyone else. Going back to, you know, my story with Pat McAfee, you know, get to a point.
Jason Swenk [00:29:25]: Build a big enough personal brand where you have the choices and the freedom to tell whoever to f off. When you do that, then you’re successful in your own eyes, because then you have the freedom in order to pick and do the things that you really love doing and the things that you don’t want to do anymore. So thanks so much, Jason, for coming on the show. And until next time, have a Swenk day.
