Take your business to the next level in today’s personal branding masterclass with Chris Ducker! He is an internationally acclaimed business mentor who helps entrepreneurs become the go-to leaders in their industries. He coined the term ”Youpreneur” to describe the rise of the personal brand entrepreneur, a new business model that very few people saw coming.
He is a keynote speaker and the author of the books ”Rise of the Youpreneur” and ”Virtual Freedom”. He has been featured in Entrepreneur magazine, Forbes, Success, Inc., and more!
Today we talk about personal branding and everything it takes to build a profitable, sustainable business around you.
PERSONAL BRANDING IS KEY FOR SUCCESS
Brandon Birkmeyer: [00:04:48] Today we get to talk about one of my favorite marketing topics, which is personal branding. I’ve worked a corporate job at ad agencies for 18 years, and I know what it’s like to have a resume instead of a reputation.
But I want to hear from you to get us kicked off here. What is the value of personal branding? Why does this matter to people?
Chris Ducker: [00:05:12] Well, it’s invaluable, plain simple. Everybody has a personal brand, right? Whether you want to build one or not is a whole different conversation piece.
Everybody has a personal brand, and that is what people say about you when you’re not around. When you’re not at that conference, or when you’re not at that coffee meeting or at that dinner party or that mastermind group, whatever it is, that’s what your personal brand is. It’s ultimately what people say about you when you’re not around.
EXPERTISE AND PERSONALITY PLAY A MAJOR ROLE
The work that we do at Youpreneur is that we focus a lot on helping people build genuinely profitable businesses around their personal brands. That really comes down to two major components.
Number one, their expertise. Obviously they need to know what the heck they’re talking about to have a fighting chance of turning it into profit. But secondly, personality comes into it, now I think more so today than ever before. We want to love people. The world is a pretty messed up place nowadays. I feel like people really do want to do business with other people more so than anything else.
We talk about marketing like a magnet and attracting the best and repelling the rest and all those other tweetable quotes and things like that. But ultimately I think it comes down to being really, really good at one core thing: adding a very healthy slice of you and being unapologetically, uniquely you at every available opportunity. That way you attract the right people into your world and at the same time repel the naysayers and the nonbelievers away.
Brandon Birkmeyer: [00:07:00] Most businesses look and sound the same. What is it about being personal brands that makes us want to say, “That’s who I want to do business with because I know them”. What is it in our culture that makes that interesting to us?
Chris Ducker: [00:07:26] Well, I think it is personality, it’s storytelling. We want to like people. We’re not born cynical a-holes. We actually really want to get on with people. We want to like people for the most part anyway.
Everyone has a story, every company, every founder has a story. Whatever that overarching narrative is, there have been some stories and subsections within those stories that you can glean one-liners, whether you’re just on the stage or maybe you’re being interviewed on a podcast. Whatever it is, I think we crave human attention and likewise, we want to give that attention back.
It’s like you got all the way back to high school. The golf kids hung out with the other golf kids. The nerds hung out with the nerds, jocks hung out with the jocks. Everybody wants to be part of something. Everybody wants to find their people. And I think that’s where the power of it comes from.
SUCCESS COMES WITH HARD WORK AND BIG DREAMS
Brandon Birkmeyer: [00:08:32] When you talk about something like your personal brand, it’s really just your reputation. It’s how people think about you. It seems easy in that regard. “I will just be myself.” And if I’m honoring the things I believe in, then it’s easy to have a good reputation. But when we twist it and we call it personal branding, suddenly it’s an intimidating thing. Why do you think personal branding is difficult? What keeps people from starting?
Chris Ducker: [00:09:00] I think there’s a couple of things. First and foremost, I think that although everything I’ve said is a hundred percent legitimately true, people are lazy as well.
A lot of people want all the stuff, all the success, all the fame, all of the notoriety, but they don’t actually want to do any work to get it. Then clearly, they’re not going to succeed. They’re not going to become famous and not going to be a notable expert in their industry and their niche.
I think a lot of it comes down to, “Oh, personal branding! I don’t want to be front and center.” But you don’t have to be front and center. You’re building a business based around you, not reliant on you.
That’s where true, tried, and tested business building elements come into play. Like team building and understanding how to read a fricking profit-and-loss statement properly; all these other things that a lot of people don’t necessarily assign to the idea of building a personal brand business, it has to be there. But the product is you and your expertise.
That doesn’t mean that you need to do every single little thing. I think a lot of people struggle to come to terms with either one, actually having to do the work itself. Those people are going to fail regardless. It doesn’t matter what they’re doing and whatever niche they’re going to be in.
Then two, it comes down to, “I don’t want to be front and center. I don’t want to have to be the be-all and end-all of everything.” Well, you don’t. And that’s what we teach.
That’s what we focus on, helping people understand. We’ve worked with many clients over the years who have gone from making good livings, five-figure living right up towards the six-figure on an annual basis. And then within just eighteen months, they’re seven-figure businesses because all they needed to do was just think a little bigger or think a little more different.
RELATED: Build your personal brand with the Content Marketing Starter Guide.
DON’T LET FEAR HOLD YOU BACK
Brandon Birkmeyer: [00:10:56] I’d like to try to go down this road, maybe challenging the idea a little bit of laziness. I think most people don’t think that they’re lazy. Maybe we have a routine and there’s something that feels safe about that. I wonder if you see that a lot when you work with people that you coached on this very thing.
Chris Ducker: [00:12:06] I think fear is normal. In fact, fear is a very, very good thing. If you’re scared of something, it means that you give a damn. People are generally nice. They like to like people, they like to be liked, et cetera, et cetera. That doesn’t necessarily mean that they care so much about what they’re doing and how they’re doing it.
If you fear something, if you’re scared about making a big move or making a big change, then that shows that you really do genuinely care about what it is you’re embarking upon. My whole thing with fear is that ninety-nine percent of the time, the things that you worry about, the things that you are scared of, they just don’t come true.
It takes me all the way back to what my mom used to say all the time. “Don’t worry about nothing until there’s something to worry about.” Why are you worrying? Nothing has happened. Why are you not going down the big slide? Why are you not diving from the top board? Why are you worried about potentially breaking your arm until there’s something to be worried about?
You shouldn’t worry about it. Fear is actually very natural and it’s a good thing. I don’t really worry so much about that. Obviously that’s relatively easy to overcome.
I think for most people anyway, the big issue is not fear, it’s change. And the fact that, as you say, routine comes in the play. Then there’s a change, and oh, I’m going to lose my salary. Now I’m out and about doing my own thing. I’ve got to fend for myself. I don’t know that there’s the exact same amount of money every single month coming into my bank account.
Now I’m starting to rethink about making moves because of mortgage, because of children, because of payments, whatever it might be. I think change is scarier for most people than fear itself, but no one ever built a successful business without having to make big changes on a pretty regular basis.
BE OPEN TO CHANGE
That’s where the art of the pivot comes into play. Those entrepreneurs that do extremely well in life and make a crap ton of money, who have an incredible impact on the people that they meet and come into contact with. Those people have adapted to change over and over again, rather more so than overcoming fear.
You have to be prepared to change and look for what the next thing is going to be. If you’re not, it’s okay. Don’t beat yourself up over it.
If you want to stay in your cushy job and get the same paycheck every month and be comfortable, then do. That’s absolutely fine. But the entrepreneur life is clearly not for you. That should be the end of the discussion within yourself. You either have it or you don’t have it.
Brandon Birkmeyer: [00:15:07] You might have different seasons of your life. You may say, I wanted to do this. I’m feeling good. Now I’m feeling the itch to scratch that dream.
Chris Ducker: [00:15:15] Absolutely. There’s a guy inside of our Youpeneur Incubator Mastermind where we meet every quarter for a one-day mastermind event in person in London. This guy is actually originally from the United States, but he’s been based out of Belgium for a long time.
He was with JP Morgan for a long, long, long, long time. The dude is well into his fifties now. He literally just made the leap maybe two or three years ago to finally turn around and say, “You know what, I’m ready now to jump ship and to become a high paid consultant and build my business around my expertise.” He’s in his 50’s, so as you say, seasons of life are a real thing.
CREATE HOW-TO CONTENT IN YOUR NICHE
Brandon Birkmeyer: [00:15:58] You wrote this book a couple of years ago called Rise of the Youpreneur. In that book, you talk about building a media company mindset. I’ve heard that before; create a lot of content, et cetera. However, you say that an authority has to focus on creating how-to content. Why is that?
Chris Ducker: [00:16:27] That is because you want to be seen as someone who knows what you’re actually talking about. When you go on the internet, and you have questions or problems, you want answers or solutions. You don’t want fluff.
This is so unsexy for a topic, but I’ll go here anyway. Just literally over the weekend, I wanted to know how to descale my brand new, very expensive espresso machine. It was the first time that I had done it. This thing is $600 US! It’s a good chunk of change to put on a coffeemaker. I had the manual. I could have read the manual.
Instead, I went to YouTube. I looked for a video on the exact model to learn how to do it from somebody who’s already done it a whole bunch of times, and then taught thousands of other people online how to do it.
Simple, very simple example there. But if I want to learn how to become a better basketball coach, I need to go hang out with other basketball coaches. If I want to learn how to become a better dad, if I’m a new dad, I need to spend more time with other dads, dads who have been doing the thing for a long time.
If I want to learn how to build a business, then I need to go and hang out and learn from other people who have done likewise. When you go to Google or YouTube and you’re looking for answers to questions, 99.9% of the time the first two words that you type in are “How To”. There you go, the proof is in the pudding, as they say.
BE UNAPOLOGETICALLY YOU
Brandon Birkmeyer: [00:18:13] That how-to content, which leads you to become known for something is one of the cornerstones of building a brand in general. For most people, figuring out your brand positioning can be difficult. How can people stand out as a personal brand in a world where everyone does the same thing?
Chris Ducker: [00:18:53] The first thing is to understand that there’s only one you. That’s why I say be uniquely and unapologetically you at the exact same time all the time.
There’s no smoke and mirrors here. It is what it is. This is me. This is who I am. This is what I do. This is what I can help you with. And this is my style. You either like it, or you don’t. There’s no gray area.
As we niche down from one side of our niche to another, the fact of the matter is we actually have a really good opportunity to become an expert a lot faster then we would do if we were to stay more broad, regardless of what industry we’re in.
For example, if you were to start a YouTube channel about arts and crafts, you’d have thousands and thousands of other channels that you’d be competing with. But now you say, “Well, instead of doing that, I’m just going to do watercolors.”
You’ve now niched down a little bit and yes, there are still hundreds and hundreds of hundreds of great YouTube channels for watercolor enthusiasts. So you say to yourself, “Hmm. Okay. I’m going to go to landscape watercolors.” That’s all you talk about, is painting landscapes using watercolors. It won’t take you very long to become the top dog within a niche, within another niche, within another niche, in a lot less time than it would if you were to go broader.
I think defining who you are and what you want to be known for is without a doubt, the key component to growing a successful personal brand business, because if you don’t know who you are and what you’re all about, and more importantly, what it is you actually want to be known for, if you don’t know that, then you’re going to have real trouble trying to get it across to other people.
BECOMING KNOWN
I started online in 2010. Obviously I had already been building businesses and whatnot for a few years prior to that, but really started to take the internet more seriously in 2010 with blogging, podcasting, video, social, the whole thing.
It only took a couple of years to be known as the VA guy. That’s what I was first known for was the guy you go to to learn how to build a business and run a business, utilizing virtual assistants.
Looking back there was a little bit of piggybacking on the whole Tim Ferriss, four hour work week thing, but the fact was that Tim wasn’t an expert in VAs. He never claimed to be, nor did he want to be.
Here I am running an outsourcing company already for a few years. I can talk to it as a position of authority because I’m actually running a million-dollar business within this niche already. We leaned into that a little bit, and that is the power of leaning into what you’re good at and staying away from the stuff that you’re not very good at. That’s what you delegate.
That’s a whole different concept for a show, but what I did was I leaned into it, and it only took a couple of years for me to be seen as that VA expert. Then the keynotes start coming in, and then the book deal for Virtual Freedom. My first book comes in and now I’m starting another company for a recruitment of virtual assistants, things like that.
It just went on and on and on for a few years. By around late 2014, 2015, I decided that I didn’t want to be the VA guy anymore. There was actually a lot more to me, and what I had to offer. People had already started coming to me for personal brand coaching and personal brand building advice because I had done it already within that subsection of my niche.
Again, the pivot was sexy. It was something I wanted to do. We leaned into it. Now I’m the personal branding guy. I will caveat that by saying that that’s what I do day to day now, but I still own and operate two different businesses within the outsourcing world.
I still keynote on virtual team building and management. And I also keynote on personal brand building as well. So you can still hold onto the niche. You don’t need to let go of it. But you can pivot, like you clearly said, whenever you feel like your interests are changing and you want to go in a slightly different direction.
There lies the importance of building a community and a tribe of people who like you as the person, on top of obviously what problems you’re solving for them. When you pivot, when you change direction, a good amount of those people who are already following you will come with so you’re not starting from scratch all over again. That’s the goal.
GET TO KNOW CHRIS DUCKER
Brandon Birkmeyer: [00:25:16] I do have a couple of questions here that start to pivot and change where we’re going, but I do want to take a moment to acknowledge what you’re excited about, what you’re working on right now, and where people can find you.
Chris Ducker: [00:25:27] Youpreneur is our main focus from a business perspective nowadays. We still own and operate a couple of other businesses. We recently made the move back to the UK here to Cambridge, so we’re no longer based over in the Philippines, which was where I was living for quite some time.
Youpreneur.com is the main hub for everything that we do. We have Youpreneur Academy, which is our monthly online membership. We have the Youpreneur Incubator, which is our mastermind program. Then we have the Youpreneur Summit, our annual conference which takes place in London each November. They’re kind of the three main components of that Youpreneur ecosystem.
Things I’m really excited about right now for this year, first and foremost, is we’ve had a big gaping hole in our own ecosystem for digital course content. It’s not something that we’ve really looked at all that much.
We’ve got too many courses planned for this year, the first one actually being on virtual team building and management. Again, going back to the OG niche, I love this stuff. It’s great. Then there’s one also around building your online audience and that sort of thing later in the year. I’m very excited about completing that part of the ecosystem, because it is something that’s been there and empty for a while. We’re looking forward to filling that up.
I appreciate you mentioning that though, Brandon, because we actually worked really, really hard up front in the middle 2018 through to the end of 2019. I worked really hard on that site and the content within the site.
KNOW WHEN TO BRING IN EXPERTS
We’re not necessarily saying that we need to do one blog post a week, one podcast a week, or anything like that but we saw within the personal brand business niche all these different sub-niches. I’m not an expert on everything, so I would bring in somebody who was an expert on public speaking or someone who was an expert on email funnels or someone who’s an expert on putting on and holding great webinars.
We ultimately wanted Youpreneur.com to be the entrepreneur dot com of personal brand business. I don’t know the exact number of pieces of content on that website, but I think it’s gotta be close to about six hundred that we’ve published in a year and a half. So I acknowledge you acknowledging it because it was a lot of work.
Brandon Birkmeyer: [00:28:32] Do you think, as you’re talking about building this media company mindset, as you grow and more people are looking to you for help, do you see yourself switching to a more contributor based model, having more people come in contributing stories and submitting stories?
Chris Ducker: [00:28:49] Oh, without a doubt. We’ve kind of already done that. It’s never been a big official thing, but I would say out of those six hundred or so pieces of content, I reckon a good two hundred, maybe two hundred and fifty pieces are written by contributors. Although it’s still quite team led at this point, we have slowly but surely taken on board more and more contributor articles and things like that.
The danger you run with doing that type of thing though, from a content perspective, is that you get people that write content just for the sake of writing the content, to try and get a backlink. That’s not my jam at all. So we’ve been very, very, very strict. Any contributor article on Youpreneur.com is being written by a genuine expert on whatever it is they’re talking about.
I’m not being funny, but anybody with an internet connection can research how to grow your brand on Instagram. I want somebody who’s keynoted 20 times in the last year on how to grow your business on Instagram, teaching my people how to do that.
SURROUND YOURSELF WITH KNOWLEDGE
Brandon Birkmeyer: [00:29:59] I think since you have a good circle of people now that you’ve been around for all these years, it starts to become easy to know who the experts are that are running in your circle. I want to talk about that for a second.
You probably have one of the best takes on networking I’ve ever heard. What I’ve read is, you call it growing your business circle. One of the things you call out is going to events, and you say smaller events are a good place for you to build better relationships with other experts. How have you found success in growing your inner circle?
Chris Ducker: [00:30:34] Definitely going to the events is number one, first and foremost. In terms of the overarching plan of growing that circle, I will say probably the best investment of time and money that I’ve ever made as an entrepreneur, bar none, has been being part of mastermind groups. That’s been the big thing for me and it’s one of the reasons why we’ve been running live events now ourselves as a company for nine years.
At every single live event that we run, we have a mastermind group component at it. Sometimes the entire event is just that, quite frankly. I don’t think you can put a dollar amount on the value of surrounding yourself with other people that just get it, and have been there, are doing it still, and are doing it with you at the same time.
Nobody has a monopoly on good ideas. The old adage, “If you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room,” is very, very true. I want to be the complete idiot at the table. I’ve been building businesses for 15 years now. I want to be the least experienced person in that environment.
I still know, because of what I know, I can help other people around the table because you don’t know what you don’t know. That’s for sure. I know I’ve still got value to share, but I want to be around people who have been doing this for longer than me or are bigger than me, or more profitable than me, whatever it is.
BUILDING YOUR NETWORK
Live events are absolutely huge. But to your point, smaller live events I think are actually the way things are going. I’m not saying ten, twenty, thirty people. That’s a networking breakfast. I’m not talking about stuff like that.
What I’m talking about is very large industry events, four or five thousand people, and then you have more intimate industry events, three hundred, four hundred people. They are the kind of events I want to speak at, number one, attend, number two, and network at, number three.
I’d rather go to a smaller industry event, the three, four hundred people than a much, much bigger one. The connection that I can make, from the keynote perspective if I’m on stage, I can see every single face if there are three hundred people in the audience. I will connect with every single person in that room in forty-five minutes from a visual perspective. Whereas if there are four thousand people in the audience, it’s impossible. You just can’t do it.
Without a doubt, events have been absolutely huge for me. It’s just about really putting yourself into situations where you’re going to meet people with different ideas, different experiences, different upbringings. We’re all different, man. I just want to learn from people who’ve already been there, have been in certain situations, handled different tribulations and trials, and all the rest of it.
Brandon Birkmeyer: [00:34:46] You mentioned that you’re in a couple of masterminds. I would ask if you could share how do you go about choosing and finding ones that seem like a fit for you? Do you pick the people you want to be around? How do you go about finding what works for you?
Chris Ducker: [00:35:22] There are two things. Nine times out of ten it’s either person related or it’s subject related.
KNOW WHAT YOU ARE LOOKING FOR
You might want to learn from one particular person or be around a particular person, say the person leading the mastermind group itself. You know that that person attracts people of a similar mindset that you want to be at, so you want to be around that person and their people.
Or, the flip side to that is it’s subject-based. There are a lot of masterminds who are run by people you and I have never heard of before, but they’ve been teaching people how to build teams and SOPs within those teams for over a decade.
If I want to learn how to build a team and create standard operating procedures for that team to follow, I’m not going to go to the guy who’s great on a new media approach. I’m going to go to the guy who’s been building teams for ten years.
I think it comes down to one or the other. To your point, I’ve been a member of a mastermind for probably the best part of a decade. I’m a member of two right now.
One of them is paid and is subject-based. The second one is peer organized. It’s “free”. We don’t pay for anything. I’d say probably three times a year we meet up as a small group of five or six people. We’re all men, we’re all fathers and we’re all business owners.
We meet up and we talk about those three big things and how we can balance all of those. We drink incredible scotch in the evenings and come up with amazing ideas during the daytime. We do that for a few days, a few times each year, but again, that’s more peer-driven. They’re the people you want to be around.
MAKING MONEY OFF OF YOUR EXPERTISE
Brandon Birkmeyer: [00:37:26] As we come towards the back end of the podcast here, there are two things that are burning in my mind, but I think you only have time to maybe answer one. I’ll give you both and you can pick between them.
The first is that people are going to say, once I have started doing this work, how do I grow people’s awareness of me? How do I bring people into my world? How do people find me? Part two is, how do I make any money off of this?
Chris Ducker: [00:38:16] They’re two shows in and amongst their own, you’re right.
Ultimately I cover these two things a hell of a lot in depth in Rise of the Youpreneur, so you should definitely link to the book. It is the best fifteen bucks anybody will ever spend if this is what they want to learn.
PASSIVE INCOME IS NOT A THING
First and foremost, making money out of your expertise and your personality is way easier than most people think it is, but it’s hard work. Passive income is not a thing, because you have to create the opportunity for that income that comes in, which comes out of hard work. You might be able to put it somewhat on autopilot, but ultimately true passive income doesn’t really exist.
You’ve got to do something for it, but when we talk about personal brand businesses, it’s initially trading time for money. People will pay for your expertise, to download your expertise from your brain into their brain. They’re happy to pay for it. In fact, actually we are more open to pay for that kind of ability, to learn quickly off somebody who’s been there and done that today than we ever have been in the history of Western civilization.
Why do you think coaches, consultants, and experts are making so much money out there? It’s because people appreciate and understand the power of fast-tracking their own success by engaging the services of people who have been there and done it already.
That’s the first thing. Obviously you’ve got online courses, to have that one-to-many approach instead of that one-to-one approach and all that sort of stuff. There’s a lot of different ways you can monetize a personal brand. In fact, there’s an entire playbook at the back of that book that I wrote, so they should go check that out if that’s what they’re into.
SPREADING YOUR MESSAGE
In regards to spreading a message and getting it out there, there are two things that I do very, very religiously even now to this day. The first thing is I make sure that I create and publish valuable original content on a weekly basis. If you can do that two or three times a week, then obviously you will be found more frequently in more places than you would do if you were to do it just once a week via a YouTube video.
The people on YouTube will find you, but those that are looking for content via Google or the iTunes podcast app probably won’t. It’s not a matter of being everywhere. It’s just about picking your fights at the right time and seeing what’s hot and what’s not, just making sure that you’re turning up regularly, consistently publishing really helpful, valuable, original content. It’s very much all that you and what you can do for people.
The other thing that I do on a very regular basis for spreading my message is this. I get asked to be on shows four or five times a day probably currently. It’s certainly been more than that in the past. It’ll probably be less than that in the future, but right now, four to five invites a day.
I only do about three a week. I’m very picky, very choosy with the shows that I go on, but when I do, I respect the fact that that host is ultimately introducing me into their inner circle. You’ve got to show up and provide value in that regards as well.
The goal here is to do that on mass with your audience, but I guarantee you there’ll be somebody that listens to this or watches this or tunes into a soundbite somewhere. Someone will hear what you and I have been talking about today, and it’ll bring clarity to a situation that they’re currently handling.
At the very core of everything we do, that is what it’s all about because we’re here to solve people’s problems. That’s it. Don’t have any delusions of grandeur. That’s all we that’s all we do.
WHERE TO FIND CHRIS DUCKER
Chris’s personal site: www.chrisducker.com
Chris’s business site: youpreneur.com
Youpreneur Summit: youpreneursummit.com
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