In this video, Matt reacts to a business owner and his advice on how to make money. He shares three key skills: personal branding, marketing, and negotiation. While Matt generally agrees with these points, he has a major concern about building a personal brand, especially for a small business. He’ll break down the pros and cons of being the face of your company and why it could limit your growth and make it difficult to sell your business down the road.
There are tons of people out on social media giving business advice. Some of it is good advice, but most of it isn’t good. In this series watch CapForge’s owner react to different advice videos. He’s an expert in all things business and has 20+ years of experience under his belt. Some of the things he reacts to might even surprise you!
Video Transcript:
Business Advice Video:
These are three skills to learn to make money. Number one is personal branding. People buy Prime Energy drink because of Logan Paul. Women buy lingerie from Fenty because of Rihanna. Build a personal brand leads to more business for your company. The number two skill to learn to make money is marketing. Marketing is just a fancy way of building relationships that turn into financial gain. If you’re not introducing your business to the world, how are they going to know what you have to offer? The number three skill to learn to make money is negotiations in terms of customer reviews. Your customers will let you know if your price is too high because you’ll get a lot of no’s, or if it’s too low because you’ll get a lot of yeses.
Matt’s Review:
All right, he made a few points. I think generally they’re good. The one I want to hit on is creating a personal brand. There are pros and cons to creating a personal brand. The pro is that you have control over it. You can make it what you want it to be. And people do like to relate to a person. The downside of a personal brand is that if people know you as the face of your business, then they generally want to communicate with you. They want to interact with you. They don’t want to accept substitutes. Now, a brand like Venti or Fenty or whatever, Rihanna’s brand, yes, they realize that they buy one of her pieces of clothing that’s not going to come with an invitation to come drop by her house or hang out with her, get lunch. But if you’re a small business like 99.99% of the people who are listening to this, or starting a business like this, or thinking about having a personal brand, you are small enough, and you are not enough of a name that people aren’t going to expect to be able to talk to you directly. The problem with this is as you get bigger, which is always the goal, you can’t be everywhere. So, either it limits your growth, or you have to start backing away from providing that personal service and having people directly interact with you, which is a problem, and it’s gonna hurt your scaling. So, there’s lots of brands out there that don’t do this. Google, Microsoft, Amazon. They’ve gotten plenty big without being specifically about a person or personal branding. This is the direction I would go because down the road, if you’ve done a good job in growing the business and you want to sell it, it’s much much easier to sell something called Google than something called Michael Kors. Michael Kors is, they’re going to expect to get Michael Kors as part of the deal because his name’s on the building. Whereas with Google, they’re just interested in getting the company itself.