On this episode of the Lab Coat Agents Podcast, Jeff talks to Rory Vaden. He is an absolute beast, a stud, an expert, a guy that Jeff has looked up to and has read both of his books.  Rory has built a group called Brand Builders. He is a top 100 speaker, two-time world champion, best-selling author for ‘Taking the Stairs’ and ‘Procrastinating on Purpose’. Rory’s TEDx has been viewed over 3 million times.  Episode Highlights: Rory explains how he started a brand builders’ group, and he prepared one on one personal brand strategy for anyone they called mission-driven messengers. Brand Builders teaches people how to build and monetize their brand, reaching more people; He desires to make a difference in his community, industry, profession, and trade. Jeff asks, “How do I need to shift my mindset to understand why what you do is valuable to my business?”  Personal branding is simply the digitization of reputation. Rory explains how it is built on trust. 82% of Americans say that companies are more influential if their founders or executives have a personal brand they know, trust, or follow. For the most part, what you had for lunch or what’s going on with your kids, or the trophies you want or your latest listings, all of those are irrelevant to someone who is a visiting stranger, says Rory. You try to use your brand to drive awareness for something that you are doing because there are only a few ways to monetize a personal brand. Ads and affiliates mean I’m not selling my audience anything. I’m selling other people access to my audience, and they’re paying me to have the opportunity to put their brand in front of my audience, says Rory. What can you do to add value to the person you’re trying to reach? The content you put out should be what is helpful for the person you’re trying to target.  Some principles apply to everybody, but the honest answer, there’s not a right answer to each thing, there’s only a right answer for you. 58% of Americans said they would be willing to pay more money to receive the same service from a professional with a personal brand versus someone who worked at just a large company that they didn’t know.  Jeff says, just because the brand is more prevalent, it might lend credibility; But at the end of the day, it’s still going to come down to the individual and whether it’s your statistics, personality, or reality, whatever it is, that is why people will choose you. For individual real estate agents, some are still struggling- To answer their questions of: Where should I go from here? What should I do next time? Do I need to define my content strategy and the platform? Where do I go and where do I start at the very basic level? Rory gives his advice. You have to be the go-to leading authority on something; If you are not, you are the noise. So even though you’re frustrated that there’s noise, you are the noise. The narrower you are, the more money you make because you are most powerfully positioned to serve the person you once were. Confidence and certainty come from clarity and most small business owners are completely unclear. They are unclear about who they serve and about what makes them different.   3 Key Points: Many people, when they hear the term personal branding, their mind goes to “You guys do websites”, or “You do graphic design”, or “You do logos and colors” for example. Those are branding agencies, and Brand Builders with Rory is the strategy firm. Personal branding is the digitization of reputation. It allows people to get a chance to be exposed, not to your company, not to who you work for, not to what you do, not even really to what you know but to who you are. That is the human experience available today in a more scalable way than ever before in history because of personal branding. One of the natural ways to differentiate is just based on who you are. So we do business with people who we trust. We trust people who we see, who we learn from, and who we know something about, says Rory.