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Mark Evans: I'm Mark Evans, and welcome to Marketing Spark, a podcast that delivers insight from marketers and entrepreneurs in the trenches in twenty five minutes or less. Personal branding is red hot. Everyone's looking to stand up from the crowd. Challenge, of course, is there's a lot of competition for the spotlight. Rich Cardona is not only a personal branding and LinkedIn coach, but someone who talks the talk and walks the walk.
On LinkedIn, a key part of Rich's brand is his personal life and family. It's what makes Rich authentic, real, and trustworthy. Before inviting Rich to appear on the podcast, I felt like I knew him. I guess that's the power of personal branding.
Guest: Happy to be here, Mark. I'm I'm very, excited to give any value I possibly can to your audience.
Mark Evans: Personal branding, as I said off the top, is something that is red hot these days. Everybody's talking about it on LinkedIn. You see post after post and video after video talking about the importance of personal branding, why you have to do it, how you have to do it. And the question I have for you as somebody who runs a personal branding agency is why the focus on personal branding? Where did it come from?
Is it from the gig economy? Is it due to COVID? Is it the fact that everybody wants to be an entrepreneur these days? Or even when you work for a company, you wanna be an internal entrepreneur. What's driving this fascination with personal branding?
Guest: Actually, I'm gonna work a little bit backwards on that since you you mentioned working at a company. I am such an enormous believer in that a company who's trying to attack, attract talent and who's trying to attack a, to attract a little bit more attention are the ones that allow the the people in and on their teams to have a personal brand and rather rather than be than them being fearful of them cultivating this personal brand and leaving. If if Mark Junior is working at Rich Cardona Media and he's fantastic and he's got a great personal brand, that's gonna raise a couple eyebrows and be like, wow. What's going on over there? Or I really like the culture.
I really like the way they make content. And I could tell, like, this wasn't passed down from above. Like, hey. Please share this corporate y post of the company. So that's one aspect.
The personal brand goes with you. If you're not gonna be at a company forever, which a lot of us are not, and you don't choose to be a business owner, that's what's gonna go with you. If you are a business owner and you've been a business owner for thirteen years or at least run that company for thirteen years and you have to pivot, your personal brand goes with you. It doesn't mean you failed. It means that you've probably amassed some sort of loyalty and audience and community that is gonna to go with you because they have faith in you.
Now fully, I certainly believe that the pandemic has certainly played a large role in it because of the missed interactions that we have. There is there are those moments that are when you're walking out of a meeting and you're already talking about what was just discussed in the meeting with someone and you're gonna walk to the lunchroom and talk about it. And you're gonna have that kind of feeling with them and that trust because you're gonna have those kind of mini interactions between the meetings. Now it's just meetings. Okay.
Now it's just meetings online. They're very scheduled. It's one to two, and we're gonna cover this and that. So all those kind of mini interactions, actually matter. So how do you get a per how how do you build that trust is probably by making content and being a little bit more visible.
And without that and without that with the lack of that kind of personal brand, it's gonna really extend the timeline for people to really know what you're about, which is why during the pandemic, all the people who flourish in those kind of social environments realized, well, now I have to get on LinkedIn, or now I have to try out Instagram, or now I'm gonna dance and do something stupid on TikTok because I have to be able to kinda get out there and they probably realize what a lot of us did, is you are able to reach a lot more people. You and I met on LinkedIn. And, you know, I would venture to say that we know each other to an extent, but a virtual connection was certainly formed and that's not something that people should kind of, you know, you know, look at as as something that's unusual. It's it's very usual, and I think personal branding has a large part in that.
Mark Evans: There's a lot of people who build a personal brand without thinking about it. They write a lot of content. They speak at conferences. They do videos. They naturally meet people in different situations, and they're building their brand unintentionally.
On the other hand, there are people who have a plan of attack. They recognize that a key to success personally and professionally is establishing a strong personal brand. So they will put together all the pieces and have almost a program by which they'll follow to build that personal brand. And what I'm wondering about is whether one path unintentional or the other path intentional are the way to go. Are they mutually exclusive?
How do you view the different ways that you can build a personal brand? Some people think about it and some people not so much.
Guest: Here's what I really, really feel. And and and it is if you are intentional about it, it usually makes you veer off the path, the the kind of spirit of having a a good cohesive sought after personal brand or persona. And the reason is you start to tailor what you put out. And it doesn't need to be video, and it doesn't need to be a podcast, and it doesn't need to be a book. It could just be literally the way you show up.
You know, the entire fake it till you make it mentality, if something's getting you some of this visibility that you like and it's feeling good, then you might kinda go off to the you know, in another direction a little bit while you're still being intentional about it, and I think it deviates. So at the same time and this is such a good question for this because you if you're unintentional about it, then maybe you're gonna put you know, I I make posts about my family on Sunday. But maybe I would just be like, instead of a podcast post today on Wednesday, I'm or Thursday, I'm gonna go ahead and put out a family post, and then I'm gonna be a little bit sporadic. So now there's no method to the madness. So while it's unintentional and while it was a creative outlet, I actually might confuse people, especially if I'm a business owner.
If you confuse, you lose. So if you are confusing your potential audience, then you're probably losing some of the people that would wanna work with you the most. And I'm not even gonna really probably fully answer that because it's so hard. You should be intentional, but not to the point where you are trying to exaggerate anything about you. You want to show up exactly as you are.
If you and I ever meet in person, I will be superbly disappointed if you're anything different than you are right now. And that's the risk. That's the risk when you go too all in and you have that plan of attack.
Mark Evans: I agree that authenticity is a key element of personal branding. You know, it's almost like what you see is what you get, and I think that's the the best way to approach personal branding. The question that I have for you, given that you show your wife and your daughter in your LinkedIn videos, is balancing personal and professional when you're doing personal branding, especially platform like LinkedIn, which is supposed to be professional as opposed to personal. I it I feel like I'm chasing my tail when I ask this question, but what's your approach? And and how do people marry their personal life and who they are and what they're passionate about with what they do for a living?
Guest: I I use this very simple phrase. One of my superiors in the Marine Corps once told me, and and he used to say, if you have to look left and right before you do it, you probably shouldn't do it. Well, I think the same thing kinda goes when it comes to content. And, like, this is any medium of your choice. If if you're not sure if that's something you wanna put out there, then you probably shouldn't.
Okay? I'm talking about in terms of too much information, kinda too personal. However, if you had a victory in in, you know you know, a a personal victory or you had an amazing family moment and you are able to tie that into business, especially on a platform like LinkedIn, then that's fascinating to people. But more importantly, I think what you really have to examine is you said and you said, you know, you're supposed to be. Like, people think we're supposed to be a certain something on a platform or at a certain event or at a networking event or whatever it is that we think we're supposed to be something.
I'm not gonna say you should be anything you want. Like, I'm not I'm not that up there. There are guardrails, so to speak. However, supposed to be anything on LinkedIn is the it's limiting because our whole selves matter when it comes to a personal brand. Okay?
Like, it's important for me to put out LinkedIn stories or videos of time to time of my wife and I, how much we've run together because that's like mental health. Why does that matter? Because I really believe that that helps give me the clarity and the energy to wake up and do this every day. And you as a business owner know better than anyone, if you wake up on those days where you're like, I don't feel like playing today, then it's probably a bad bad sign. So that's how I keep it related to business.
If my daughter is on a pull up bar and trying to do this flip and she's four years old and she's trying over and over and over and I put music to it and there's a business lesson attached to that, then that's pretty good content. So the to answer your question fully is is you we are all whole people, and I think you can pick and choose. And I think, instinctually, you're gonna understand, like, does this make a point or is this kind of something I would expect to see on another platform? Like, if if am I gonna give an update on my grandmother's health on LinkedIn? Maybe.
Maybe not. But I would say probably not. So the the balance is delicate and you could always test things out. You could always test things out. There's nothing that says you can't delete a post and be like, you know what?
That's not really in my lane.
Mark Evans: Over the last year, spent a lot of a lot of us spent a lot of time building personal brands on platforms like LinkedIn and TikTok and our own blogs for that matter and podcasts. But how do you see the balance between digital personal branding and in person personal branding when we're allowed to do that again? What I mean by that is a lot of personal branding in the past has been done through networking, getting on stage, going to meetups, having dinners with people, meeting up with people for coffee, and that's been very physical time consuming work, and you can't scale that kind of activity. No. But now we've got this completely other medium that we're all leveraging and we're all seeing I think we're seeing tremendous ROI in it because it's just so efficient.
As we move forward, how do you marry them together? How do you make them work while still driving efficiencies, which I think is an important element of it?
Guest: This is you you you got a voice message from me recently letting you know that I was coming out with a newsletter. And it it is completely and unbelievably inefficient for me to to do that two hours a day to people who've engaged with my content. However, the people who have enthusiastically said, yes, Rich, your upcoming newsletter, I'm in, has been probably 99%. So I believe the value is in the inefficiencies. But how do you balance something that kind of customized?
That's yeah. I I think you have to have kind of a goal, and that goal has to be very meticulous in terms of how you're gonna divide your time. So how do you divide your time when it comes to us being able to interact with each other face to face when we both know and admit that it's not entirely scalable? You scale it by having what I like to call a high do say ratio. If if there's consistency in what I'm posting, how I'm posting about it, if I'm educating people, if I start all of a sudden posting very click baity things, you're gonna excuse me.
You're gonna lose trust. Same thing goes for in person meetups or in person in person conversations. The do say ratio, do you say what you're gonna say you're gonna do? Are you gonna be on time? I mean, that's one right there.
Like, that's the simplest thing. But the higher the do say ratio is, the better it's gonna be. Because when your name starts to travel around because of that interaction you had, whether it's digital or whether it's in person, that's gonna be something that is part of your brand and you want it. You always like to imagine as if someone's, like, watching what I'm doing, not to influence my behavior in a in a in a fabricated way, but to ensure I'm thinking, like, doing the right things for the right reasons.
Mark Evans: Quick question about LinkedIn because it's been a clear obsession of mine, probably probably more than an obsession over the last year, to get your thoughts on how the platform has evolved and how your own personal use of LinkedIn has changed over the last twelve months. And as important, how do you see it moving forward? Because a lot of us are gonna get back to work or many of us are gonna go back to the office where we won't have two or three hours a day to spend scrolling through LinkedIn and creating content. So provide some perspective on where you've come from and where do you think you're going.
Guest: LinkedIn is so interesting. From the time I started really using it when I was just connecting with people at my company, which I never recommend, I mean, you have to reach out to to now. It has evolved in so many ways, obviously, in in large part due to the kind of increase in activity with other social media platforms. Right? Like, when you have TikTok, when you have Clubhouse, all of a sudden, everyone, every social media platform is kinda scrambling to get a kinda audio version or how are we gonna I mean, LinkedIn just came out with the creator profile, the the creator moniker or whatever you wanna call it because maybe they're gonna pay creators at some point.
So anyway, so the the point is this. It's evolving rapidly, and it's actually distasteful for a lot of people. It's like, wait a second. I thought it was this, but now you're this. Like, make up your mind LinkedIn.
And then all of a sudden, see all kinds of different content that you're not used to seeing, and you and I are gonna see very different content in two months, six months, and and if we talk a year from now, we're gonna be like, wow, have things changed? So how do you how do you become adaptable to it? Especially when you are invested in your personal brand. There's nothing different that you should do except you can look at some of the other features of a platform like LinkedIn, like LinkedIn stories and just continue on. I I really do believe consistency is what's most attractive.
If all of a sudden, you know, there's new features on LinkedIn or new ways to use it or new ways to just really kinda hack engagement and those are the that's the low hanging fruit you go after because you wanna be a first adopter, but you're doing it for the wrong reasons. This is never gonna work. So I think consistency is gonna be key. Where do I see it going? It's really, really interesting.
Especially, you and I spent some time on Clubhouse. It's kinda like, you know, people on LinkedIn are trying to go to Clubhouse or people on Clubhouse trying to get people on the LinkedIn. And, you know, how much time can you possibly invest on social media? There has to be there has to be, I I would say, a a very defined limit as the amount of time you're gonna spend and and, like, kind of looking at the quantitative ROI or qualitative ROI that you can get from it. So my advice would simply to be this, just stay persistent and consistent with your personal brand and the type of content that you choose.
And I think you're gonna outlast everyone chasing for the shiny new object you and I both know, especially as entrepreneurs, those things are always usually lead. Shortcuts always lead to a longer way.
Mark Evans: Quick question about Clubhouse. I jumped on like a lot of people a couple months ago and I spent too many hours down rabbit holes listening to conversations. And then gradually, you get busy. You don't have the time. I certainly can't multitask.
I can't listen to a clubhouse conversation in the background, and I just spent less and less time on the platform. Maybe it's a mistake given the fact that that's where the audience could be, where my audience could be. Just wondering about your own experiences.
Guest: I it's it's funny. We're aligned. I don't know. I I know we used to I used to moderate on a LinkedIn room every morning, Monday to Friday for almost two hours. And I was I convinced myself, and I could be wrong, and I will say that without issue, but I convinced myself, this is gonna be big.
But I'm a personal branding agency. I'm not a LinkedIn agency. So what I was doing was offering up my time to help because I enjoyed doing that. And while it might be altruistic, so to speak, that's not an income producing activity. Of course, there's better things I can be doing than answering a lot of the same questions like, how do you think I should start using LinkedIn?
Like, if you wanna that's that's a that's actually a podcast I have to make. Be easy to help. But when it comes to the clubhouse, yes, your audience might be there, and yes, they just got, I believe, a $4,000,000,000 valuation. And and yes, it's it's very hip and you could spend hours there. But know what?
If you're a business owner or you're a professional, you shouldn't look back. You shouldn't look back. I so I scaled back. I am now no longer doing that. It's been two weeks since I've done it.
And you know what? I've been tracking my time. This is kinda crazy to admit. I've been tracking my time as if they were billable hours, and I'm looking at all the time I'm spending doing marketing activities, branding activities, sales activities, all of it to see. And I'm like, wow.
I got a haircut yesterday in the middle of the day, Mark. And I'm like, why did I do that? That actually took an hour and a half out of my day when I could've been doing this, this, and this. Clubhouse is the same thing. Okay?
If you're not careful, you're just gonna go to a room and just go listen. If you're not able to ask a question and get a real time answer without having to wait an hour or forty five minutes or whatever it may be, then you're probably wasting your time. And if you think you're gonna help the world, especially as one moderator out of 12 or 30 on a stage, then you're not. So it's really a brand play that I think is gonna fizzle out for a lot of people.
Mark Evans: Yeah. And I think that Twitter and LinkedIn and Facebook will all have audio platforms, and their audiences will gravitate to those platforms because you've got a following there already. Clubhouse, we'll see. We'll see what happens. Yeah.
Shifting gears a little bit. Wanted to get your take on advice life advice for entrepreneurs because you and I both know that running a business is a twenty four seven activity. When you've got young kids like you do, you're you've got obligations. You got responsibilities, and you need to be there. You need to be present at the important times in your daughter's life.
You know, I have three kids, and my wife and I are very involved in lots of different activities. And I understand that it's always a balancing act. Any advice, not only as a business owner, but as somebody who advises entrepreneurs on building a personal brand and probably in the process running a business about how we can make sure that the pendulum isn't all the work all the time because it's so easy, especially now to be working twenty four hours a day, seven days a week. It's hard to turn it off.
Guest: Yeah. I think and and I'm not trying to name drop here, but I I the last time I interviewed Gary Vaynerchuk, we we we talked about this a little bit. And he says what he always says about, you know, you're worried about what other people think. There is something in our minds that that influences some of the guilt that we might feel when we're very, very invested in our Here's how I look at it now. And and the reason I brought that up is because I I had a habit in the beginning of being pretty judgmental about people who were all in.
The all in on their business or all in on work, and I'm like, when do they sleep or when do they spend time with their families? Well, you know what? That's actually none of my concern because my wife is unbelievably and authentically supportive of everything I'm trying to do. And what I'm trying to do is build something very, very special special so we could be completely and utterly independently wealthy where we rely on no one except ourselves off of something I built to put my daughters through school, to go on a trip every quarter as a family and provide life experiences that they wouldn't have got otherwise. I'm not interested in an enormous crazy house or some of the material things that people think about when they think about entrepreneurship and what it'll be like to make it.
But I can tell you in order for that to happen, if you are one of those people that want those things, it's gonna require far more time than you could possibly imagine. And that's something that's an individual decision. If you don't go all in, the way you want and the way that you are able to, then you'll regret it. But one of, my most influential mentors always said to me, the time you have is the time you need. And and I believe, work life harmony, I think is the way Jeff Bezos used to put it, is is your is your work so good that your life is harmonic with it and vice versa?
Yes. So if that means, you know, the two hours that I get a day with my children is is enough, which may sound nuts to some people, and I'm not saying that's what it is for me all the time, then and I'm working and it kinda heads down the rest of the time, then maybe that's okay. If I like it to be a little bit fifty fifty and I wanna go to all the soccer games and all that other stuff when it starts, then that's okay. But it's an individual decision and I think when I said, you know, I judged other people, I realized I was judging myself. I was thinking about if I put this much time into it, what does that say about me?
But I now know, and my daughter, my older one now knows, she knows what I'm trying to do. And and that makes me feel completely confident in my decision and the amount of time I allot to the business and to her.
Mark Evans: It's interesting that you mentioned Gary Vee because he's a very polarizing figure in this 100%. Entire work life balance conversation. The guy arguably works like a maniac because he wants to own the New York Jets at some point in time, and that's an awesome life goal. Yeah. But when you look at the time that he spends versus the family that he's got, a lot it's easy for a lot of us to say that's crazy.
There's no way I'm working that that number of hours. And but to your point, if that's what he wants to do, knock your socks off. But that's not me, and and arguably, that's not you. And I think maybe that's the point of Gary Vee. He's he's unapologetic about how he wants to live his life.
And I guess the lesson for all of us is that we should embrace the same attitude, is that we are who we are. We live how we work. We work like we work, and so be it. Right?
Guest: Yeah. And I think I think one last thing I wanna mention on that is he's extremely diligent about making sure his family's never involved in anything that you see. So if that's all you see, it's almost hard to imagine that he even has a family. Like, when does he go home? When does he do this?
But we don't know, and that's okay. But here's one thing I will say, and I've interviewed a lot of, you know, like, very, you know, influencing CEOs is that they've all had that kind of conversation on the front end, you know, with their family or their significant other and be like, I will never stop working this hard because my goal is not to retire early and sit on a beach that I'm gonna get bored of in three days. And and that that makes complete sense. So if you are able you have no idea if that conversation happened or not. So that that's what I would say.
I just thought it was an interesting perspective because, you know, that you never see him. So it's almost like, does he even have a family? But yeah.
Mark Evans: A couple of final questions. One is once you're able to travel outside of North America, where would you like to go? The second question would be a good book that you've read recently.
Guest: Yes. Both great questions. The first, I would probably say, Cephaloo, which is a beach town in Sicily. And, my daughter's name is Sicily because my my wife and I fell in love with this this place. We've we've never been to Sicily, but we have been to Italy numerous times.
I would want to go there immediately and relax and eat some ridiculous pasta that are not American sized meals. They're much more, you know, and just enjoy the sunshine and get my olive skin back and just just go. That I I mean, I can just see it, in my head of how amazing it would be to to just have that time again, especially, just the two of us because, you know, it's it's hard. So that's one. Second, I actually I'm reading it right now.
It's called The Attributes by, Rich Davinny. And, there's, he is a former Navy SEAL, but he works closely with Simon Sinek. And, I'm interviewing him, as a matter of fact, in person next week. And it is a fantastic book about, you know, 25 drivers to optimal performance. And it is, I'm not really into scientific things, and that's not even a good explanation, but it breaks down perseverance and courage and and kind of the way the brain interacts and, you know, the fight or flight or freeze, like, all of these things and how peak performance is meant for a certain peak.
There is a significant drop off. So how can you perform optimally at a regular on a regular basis? So I was fascinated. So I'm I'm reading that right now, but it's it's certainly engaging. And and I'm not like a war I'm not like a a special ops, you know, military everything guy, not not even close.
But he ties in the stories pretty well to kind of apply it to business and both, you know, personal.
Mark Evans: One final question. Where can people learn about you and what you do?
Guest: Yeah. LinkedIn for sure. Rich Cardona, you could find me there. And then richcardonamedia.com. So we are just about done revamping.
So hopefully by the time this comes out, it'll be complete. But we are here for your personal branding needs, so please feel free to reach out to me with any question. And obviously, I'm obsessed with it and I've had a fantastic time here on the show.
Mark Evans: Hey. We've covered a lot of ground in the last twenty seven minutes, so I appreciate your insight. It's, it's great to talk to you in person after all the interactions on LinkedIn, all the comments, all the videos that we've watched of each other. And it's funny. It does feel like I already knew you before and obviously know you better now.
So thanks for coming on the show.
Guest: Thank you.
Mark Evans: Thanks for listening to another episode of Marketing Spark. If you enjoyed the conversation, leave a review and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, or favorite podcast app. For show notes of today's conversation and information about Rich, visit marketingspark.co/blog. If you'd like to learn more about how I help b to b SaaS companies as a fractional CMO, strategic adviser, and coach, send an email to mark@markevans.ca. I'll talk to you next time.
