How to START a Personal Brand (Full Course)

Right now, you have a choice to make.

You're either building a personal brand

to get followers or you're building it

to get customers. Gurus would tell you

that you need to make the widest content

possible to get the most amount of

views. But the reality is all you need

to do is [music] build real trust with

your ideal customer. In 2025, after 16

years of building personal brands, I

decided to do something crazy and build

my own. And in the first 10 months, we

got over 200,000 followers, 40,000

people on our email list. But most

importantly, we received over 750

applications to work with us. In this

course, I'm going to help you start your

personal brand by establishing your

brand positioning and building a content

strategy that gets real customers, not

just followers. But here's the crazy

thing. There's a chance that you are

here watching this video thinking that

you should start your personal brand

purely because you've seen somebody you

admire do it and so you think this is

just something that you have to do. A

huge mistake that I see is people are

building their personal brand just to

check a box. They have never actually

sat down and defined a goal or what

their desired outcome is and then use

that to inform whether or not they

should actually build their personal

brand. I actually believe that there

might be a case where you don't need to

do that. When I was embarking on this

crazy journey of building my own

business and potentially building my own

personal brand, I had the fortune of

being able to sit down with Gary

Vaynerchuk. Uh I worked for Gary for a

couple of years. When I shared with him

that I was considering not only building

my own consulting firm, but starting to

put out content to help people build

their personal brand, but then also

drive awareness and conversion to my

business. and his response shocked me.

This is the man that preaches online

24/7, everyone needs to be making

content. Content is the gateway drug to

what you want out of life. That's like

his direct quote. But what he said to me

is, I really think you should be sure

that this is what you really want. You

might be able to build a great business

without ever making content. I want you

to make sure that this fits into the

life that you are building. And as you

can imagine, sitting down with the

content king, hearing something like

that, it caused me to think twice. And I

really tried to look at what am I trying

to accomplish? Is making content

publicly, is this necessary to

accomplish that? And what I realized is

that I had two main goals. The first one

was that I wanted to grow my business.

Theoretically, I could do that without

making content. But the second goal was

that I wanted to help people build a

personal brand. I think there's a

shitload of people teaching people how

to build a bad personal brand that makes

the world worse. I want to help people

build personal brands that add to the

world, that make the world better. I

wanted to do that for a huge amount of

people that I know will never work with

us directly at Rston. They'll never pay

us a dime. And so the first desired

outcome I had, I could accomplish that

without making content. The second one

where I help a bunch of people for free

that never work with us, I would never

have been able to do that, at least at

the scale that I'm looking to accomplish

without making content. And so it

answered the question for me. The beauty

of it is now I have something to measure

against. Every decision I make supports

those two desired outcomes. Is this

helping build the business or is this

helping educate people for free? If it's

not doing one of those two things, I'm

probably not gonna put it out in the

content. You really need to think about

what it is that you are trying to

accomplish and whether or not content

supports that. So, all that to say, it

was absolutely insane to me that Gary

said this and kind of gave me a pause,

but it really made me realize just how

important it is to establish and

understand the end goal in mind because

you may realize that there are better

ways of accomplishing that goal outside

of making content. Here's an example.

Uh, I have a friend who is in uh

executive protection, okay? And let's

say that this friend of mine is

currently a security guard at a local

mall or a local bank. We'll use the mall

example. And they have the desire to

work their way up into executive

protection where they are protecting and

being like a basically a bodyguard for

somebody who is probably pretty

important. If you're going to be Taylor

Swift's uh EP, it's probably not a good

thing if a bunch of people know who you

are because you're not going to be able

to move through different scenarios as

discreetly. In that case, do you think

that it would be a good idea to make

content? Do you think that making

content and building your personal brand

publicly will help you accomplish your

desired outcome? I'm going to go ahead

and answer it for you. I'm going to say

the answer is no. There are scenarios

where being more publicly known actually

hurts your desired outcome and makes it

harder to accomplish the goal at hand

rather than easier. And so what we need

to do is we need to establish what is

that desired outcome? What are we trying

to accomplish? And does building a

public personal brand and making content

support that or does it hurt it? But

before we get into establishing your

brand positioning, I want to figure out

what this goal is, this desired outcome

that you have, what you're trying to

achieve. A couple years ago, I came up

with a framework called the brand

journey framework. And it's four simple

questions and it basically helps you

figure out what that desired outcome is

and then everything you need to do from

today to get to that point. It reverse

engineers all the way from the desired

outcome to today. Very, very simple.

very effective. But actually, before we

get into the questions, we have a

workbook that goes with this entire

course and it allows you to take what

you are hearing me say and supposedly

learning and actually make sure that you

learn it and apply it to your personal

brand. You're going to click that link,

go to the website, enter your email. We

will send you the workbook for you to

download and go through in accordance

with this entire course. And the brand

journey framework is the first exercise

you're going to do. Here's the four

simple questions. Question number one is

what is your desired outcome? What are

you wanting to achieve? The second

question you'll answer is in order to

achieve that desired outcome, what would

I need to be known for? Right? Like what

is the reputation that I need to have?

The third question is in order to

develop that reputation to be known for

the thing to get the outcome I desire.

What would you have to do? We become

known for things not just by saying

[ __ ] out of our mouth but by the

actions that we actually take day in and

day out. What are the actions you need

to do to be known for the thing to get

your desired outcome? The last and final

question, the fourth one, what do I need

to learn in order to do the things to

become known for the thing to get my

desired outcome? If you go through this

journey, you're going to have a very

clear road map on how you're going to

get to your desired outcome. But then

you can look at what is that end goal in

mind and does making content accelerate

my ability to get there or does it

actually make it slower and harder for

me to accomplish that goal? If the

answer is it makes it easier, amazing.

Let's proceed. If the answer is it

doesn't make it easier and it's actually