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How to Build a Powerful Personal Brand (Episode 120)

Rocky Buckley is an entrepreneur, coach, consultant, and the creator of the Platinum Path mastermind. He and his faculty of experts help thought leaders, authors, speakers, consultants, and coaches reinvent their expertise and shift into a high-priced, lifestyle-friendly business model.

He is also the creator of the Power Persona framework, a unique “inside-out” strategy for personal branding and positioning as a public figure.

Over the last 22 years, Rocky has helped his clients bring over 100 million dollars in training programs, curricula, and information products to the market. He’s consulted on over 3000 projects for clients ranging from billion-dollar brands like Pearson, Wiley, and Macmillan, to experts, authors, and entrepreneurs in 7 countries and over a hundred different markets.

What you will learn

  • How Rocky help his clients generate five figure profits
  • The strategies Rocky used to grow his highly engaged Facebook group
  • Rocky’s unique Power Persona framework
  • How to lay the best foundation when building a personal brand
  • The secret to systemizing your expertise to achieve work-life balance
  • How to leverage your time more effectively
  • Content Proliferation: How to repurpose your content to get the most out of it
  • Rocky’s best tips on designing the life you want

Transcript

Jeff Bullas

00:00:06 - 00:01:07

Hi everyone and welcome to the Jeff Bullas show. Today I have with me, Rocky Buckley. Now, Rocky Buckley is from Virginia in the United States and is the creator of Platinum Path and The Power Persona Project and we're gonna find out more about those very shortly. He helps experts, thought leaders and influencers to “Go Platinum” by reinventing their brand, strategy and business model. Rocky helps transform what experts influence thought leaders already know into high priced training programs so they can generate five figure clients and create lucrative lifestyle businesses that they can run in a few hours a week. You had me at a few hours a week, so who doesn't want to make, you know, good money and do it with a little time as possible. So Rocky, tell us what led you on this path to create the platinum path and what you do at university, which is quite different to what you're doing now.

Rocky Buckley

00:01:07 - 00:06:18

Well, hey Jeff, thank you so much for having me on, I appreciate it. Yeah, the long and the short of it is, you know, growing up I was somebody who was kind of a high potential person. I was a young kid who had a high IQ, I skipped a grade and was always had this burden of potential on me. From my parents and from everybody around me, there was a lot expected of me growing up as a kid and it was like you can do anything you want and so on and so growing up, you know, I always felt that sense of responsibility, call it pressure, positive pressure, whatever, to kind of be somebody and be something and do something important in the world and I kind of felt that from the time I was young and so you know as a young man, as a teenager, you know, I was always thinking about ways to make an impact in the world. My first love really was baseball, I want to be a baseball player and you know, in my early, you know, my early teens and so on and then deeper into my teens, baseball was probably my biggest passion, but even in that sense, I was always thinking about it from the standpoint of how could I leverage baseball into being a role model? How could, because I, you know, I grew up near the New York Yankees, I was a big New York Yankees fan, which is, you know, for you, I know you have a worldwide audience, but that is the, you know, the number one major league baseball team of all time, one of the top sports franchises and so you know, I saw myself as somebody who, even if I became a baseball player, could leverage fame or success into being able to impact lives. A lot of the New York Yankees players, you know, lived nearby and they spoke in different areas, they may have spoken at a church or played basketball at a high school and they were always doing things in the community to make a difference. And I kind of always saw myself as you know, going in that direction in some way, Well baseball began to morph as I got a little bit older into a desire to be a filmmaker, I started to write screenplays and I wanted to be an actor at one time when I was 18 years old, 19 years old, wrote screenplays, I went to film school and that itself became another thing. How can I make movies that impact the world? And if I'm in that position where, you know, I can speak to large audiences all around the world through my art, through my film, I can make an impact, you know, so for me it was always, you know, growing up was always about impact. In my early 20's, I kind of had a pivot in life, I got very deeply involved in ministry and ministry leadership, which was all about impacting lives, and it was a real desire and vision to change lives, to be able to bring people into a place of, you know, health and you know, success and in all areas of life and so on really, and to integrate faith with life in a way that really played out and bore a lot of fruit in a very high quality of life, you know, so, all the way since I was a little kid, you know, it's always been about, can I leverage what I'm doing into making an impact? So when I was around 32 years old, I started my first business and you know, that's a whole other story, but long and short of it is 20 years down the road, I started to realize, you know, I've had this business that I built it up into something pretty successful, really big clients and so on, but I wasn't making any impact and that whole desire that I had my whole life, 20 years into my business, I realized like and I had realized that along the way, but it really hit a crisis point at about the 20 year mark where it was like, you know what, yes, I'm doing okay on this one level, on a business level and I've got a great family and everything like that, but I felt like I wasn't really making an impact in the world and I started to hit an age where it was like, if I'm ever going to make a pivot, I need to do it because I'm not going to be able to do it and you know that in the near future if I don't do it now.

So that was kind of what led me into this area, you know, I, as we talked about prior to going live, you know, one of the biggest drivers for me is people's potential. I wanted to see it in myself, fulfill my own potential, but I also want to see it in other people. I'm very driven and very passionate to see people really unlock themselves, really become the best that they can be and you know, and so when I put everything together strategically it was like, well who could I really help the most? I have been working with experts and authors for many, many years in my consulting business and I was like how can I take that knowledge and all those chops I developed over 20 years and kind of marry that to high potential people who were sort of stuck and there was a whole other level available for them and so that was kind of what put me into the space that I'm in now working with solo entrepreneurs kind of like myself who had, you know, a lot of potential could have become a lot more and feel that they're just kind of trapped and what I do is really help people to unlock the best version of themselves and put that into a business model that can really give them success on all levels, not just in business, but also in life.

Jeff Bullas

00:06:18 - 00:06:29

Yeah, so that led you, and I mean by impact is to actually make a positive impact for people to reach their potential. That's what you mean by impact?

Rocky Buckley

00:06:29 - 00:06:32

Yeah, definitely.

Jeff Bullas

00:06:33 - 00:06:54

So the other thing, so tell us a little bit more about, you know, one of your two key areas, the Power Persona Project and you've built a Facebook group of 1000 plus experts. Tell us a bit, what you do there and also how you work with and how you grew that to 1000 experts.

Rocky Buckley

00:06:54 - 00:10:48

Sure. Well, you know, the Facebook community was really my first foray into becoming a public figure myself. It was really the first time that I ever kind of put myself out there, my whole business prior was working with corporate clients, kind of a behind the scenes guy. I was, you know, with author projects, I would, you know, I would help them to create things, bring things into the world and so on. But I was more of a behind the scenes guy and I had never really built a big social media presence, never built any kind of a following and so on because my clients were large corporations for the most part. And so the Power Persona Project for me was kind of an experimental way to sort of build an audience and get myself out there and start to find my own voice as a leader in this space and so on. And so what I've done is, yeah, I've amassed a pretty nice group of experts, thought leaders and so on from around the world. I've had the privilege of being able to interview inside of my group, people like Kevin Harrington from Shark Tank, Bob Burg, you know, the Hall of Fame speaker and author, internet marketers like Steve McLaren, Pedro Adao and many many others. And so it's given me a really nice platform and a connection with some people at that level. And what I really do is I talk about the inner game and outer game of success as a public figure inside of that community. So I really believe that, you know, people who think about personal branding and putting themselves out there and building kind of a public figure, public persona often do it from the outside in, just from a tactical level. It's like okay, what kind of content can I put out? What does my logo look like? What does my website look like? What are my colors and my photo shoot and all of this kind of stuff. And so they primarily think about building that kind of public figure brand from the outside in, they think about it from a tactical level as opposed to an internal strategic level. And so what I like to do is focus on both of those. The outer game part of it is really important, of course, marketing is extremely important. But what a lot of people do is they start to put out a lot of material content into the world and they find that it's not resonating with anyone. And the question is, you know why. Right. And so a lot of the reason why people don't resonate is because they haven't really nailed who they are, what they bring, how they differentiate themselves, what makes them unique, how they position themselves differently, right. And how that all plays out in terms of their messaging and their, you know, their content, their story, all of those kind of things that they bring out. So what I like to do is start with the inner game perspective, I like to work with people at a life vision level, kind of get clear on what is it that you really want? Who do you ultimately want to be in the world? Five years, ten years, twenty years from now, let's get really clear on that vision. And then we'll see how that plays out now into your business vision and we'll start working on that. Who do you need to be in that role as a business leader? What does that look like? Okay, and then we look in terms of this, you know, sort of these inner game areas like your identity, your belief structure, your capabilities, your personality, again, your life story, how you actually look at your topic in a way that's different than everybody else, right. So there's a lot of this inner work, this foundation building where that I think needs to be done strategically, that makes all of the tactical stuff really work. That's what makes you resonate. We want to be able to project a very clear signal out into the market. It's a very crowded market. It's hard to stand out. There's a lot of voices out there and so the more clear and precise a signal that we can send into the market, the more we're going to resonate with those ideal people that we are looking to connect with. So that's kind of what the framework is inside of the Power Persona community. It really is all about these inner game and outer game areas.

Jeff Bullas

00:10:49 - 00:11:00

So what does that look like in terms of how you run it? What's the process? What do you do each week in the Power Persona Project? What are the activities you do?

Rocky Buckley

00:11:00 - 00:12:09

Sure. I post a lot of content, primarily questions. One of the things that I've learned is posting a lot of like, well written content, like long authority posts that used to work a few years ago, nobody really reads those anymore. So the way that I really learned how to engage people and our group is very highly engaged, I think if you go in there, you know, you'll see there's a lot of comments, a lot of activity is asking very, you know, um insightful questions or incisive questions that people want to answer. And I do most of my work really in the comments. So when people, you know, may answer a question or in a post, I'll try to drill into that with them. And what do you mean by that, exactly? Can you clarify that more. And I will start drawing out in them some of the things that they think and so on. And it's in that point that I can add insight, advice and so on in the comments, you know, also interview people, I do write content as well, there's a lot of engagement conversation and video content and so on, so there's a lot of stuff in there. I spent a lot of time in there and I interact quite a bit.

Jeff Bullas

00:12:10 - 00:12:14

So is that a private group that is invitation only?

Rocky Buckley

00:12:15 - 00:12:22

It's not invitation only, but people do need to, you know, they have to join and you know, I have to approve them into the group.

Jeff Bullas

00:12:22 - 00:12:25

And is there a certain profile that you're looking for in that?

Rocky Buckley

00:12:26 - 00:13:08

The kind of people that I'm looking for, anyone who's building some kind of a personal brand, you know, you're looking, you're a leader, typically it's a solo preneurs who is an author, speaker, expert, coach consultant, but there's also, you know, the service provider who's reinventing themselves, there's the corporate executive who's looking to maybe go out on their own and start their own business and become a personal brand or they're trying to be a personal brand in the job in their career as a leader and an executive sort of context. So really anybody who's looking to tap into these principles of personal branding, public figure, leadership. Anybody like that is a great fit for our group.

Jeff Bullas

00:13:09 - 00:13:20

So what would be your top tips for building a Powerful Persona and personal brand? What would be some of your top tips? Is there a framework, the steps?

Rocky Buckley

00:13:21 - 00:17:08

Some of that stuff that I had mentioned in the previous conversation are some of those steps, I do believe that it begins with life vision. I think you have to be very clear on knowing what you want and the way that I do, it is very granular, I don't, it's not just vague, like I want to live a good life and be healthy and I'm getting very, very specific, measurable, etcetera in many areas of life. So I get you crystal clear on what you want in life. Now, looking at that as a composite, you start to kind of make decisions now, what kind of business model fits the life that I want, because sometimes, you know, there's people who, they have conflicts at the life vision and the business model level, what I mean by that might be, you know, I want to be a famous speaker and I want to be speaking on stages all around the world, but at the same time, I want to be a parent who's very present with my children and it's like there's a conflict there because the business vision doesn't really fit the life vision and so what I like to do is holistically kind of bring all that together, What do you want out of life? Who do you want to become? Now let's look at your business model and tailor your business model to your life. Within that, what does that role look like for you? Who do you need to be in that role? Okay then from there it's like, okay, let's look at all of the internal resources that you bring. What are your talents? What are your gifts? What are you really good at? What are you passionate about? What are you an expert out? Can we take your expertise and maybe recast it in a different direction where it has more value? Right. So there might be an audience where you're serving a very general audience or maybe you're serving an audience that isn't going to pay a lot. Whereas if you just shifted what you did a little bit, you could end up charging a lot more establishing yourself as more of a premium brand and so on, right. And it changes your entire positioning. So we go through this internal strategic process and get you really, really clear on who you are, who you want to become and then we start to develop the business strategy. How do you know? Look at your market, who's in your market? What are the kind of message is that people are used to hearing in your market? what are the kind of personalities that are there? Who are the gurus, who are the experts and how can we now position you as unique in your own space? How can you be first and only in a category inside of that market, right. This is all goes back to Al Ries and Jack Trout Positioning, right. Those concepts, how do we make you stand out in that area? And then it becomes like, how do we look inside, what is your life story? How do we take the life lessons? Those poignant moments from your life that were there, where you learned lessons, right. How do we extract all of that from you and now turn that into messaging content and so on that positions you, that makes you stand out and makes you connect with an audience, right. People want that emotional personal connection. And so from that point, you know, we start to build it out into a strategy and then a monetization model, of course, how do you actually want to get paid? You know, do you want to have a membership community, do you want to sell high ticket programs? $25,000- $50,000 program. Can we do that? So what do you actually want? And what does that look like in a business model? And then how do we get you there? So that's kind of, I've taken you through a very long spectrum, but I really do believe that you build it from the inside out, that's I think if there's one thing that I would say I do differently or I talk about this differently than a lot of people do is I start with the inside and use that as a foundation and build out from there.

Jeff Bullas

00:17:09 - 00:17:47

I think you're starting from, you know, the best foundation, in other words, you are encouraging people to actually find out why they're on the planet. What are your gifts? Then how can we create something and position you to withdraw content and then how can we get that out to the world? And then that sort of like testing, then the last part is okay, how do I monetize this and how to design a life that works for me rather than just falling into the box of lawyer, corporate executive, whatever. So that's really what you're saying, which has come from a really from the heart and from the soul, doesn't it?

Rocky Buckley

00:17:48 - 00:19:10

I think it does, you know, and it also, one of the other things I would say is it also plays into your marketing approach as well. You know, marketing is so important and how we message and what I've found over the years is that a lot of people sell kind of a one trick pony formula for marketing, you know, it might be run Facebook ads and have a webinar or start a Facebook group or whatever and it's sort of this one size fits all framework that people try to pigeonhole other people into. And invariably it doesn't work, that's why when people join high ticket programs, typically there's very high failure rates, you know, 90 something percent and people have spent a lot of money and they come away without the result that they wanted. And a lot of times that's because in those programs they didn't really understand the person, where they're coming from, what they're really good at, what they're really passionate about and how do we take that and put that into a marketing framework that you're going to actually love to do every day? So maybe you hate being on video, but you're a really good writer, you know, or vice versa, maybe you love to be interviewed or whatever. So you're even down to the everyday daily habits of marketing, it's like we've got to tap that into what you love and what you're really good at, otherwise, you know, it's probably gonna fall flat.

Jeff Bullas

00:19:10 - 00:19:48

Yeah, and it's true that some people prefer different types of media, so, you know, I love to read. So writing comes out of that. We are doing video here because I do enjoy having a good chat and finding out, hearing people's stories and their expertise and tap into their superpowers and you know, I really like the approach and it's very central to what I have learned over the years to why are you here. And then how can we make that alive? How can we design a life that works for you rather than doing something that works for someone else?

Rocky Buckley

00:19:49 - 00:19:50

Absolutely.

Jeff Bullas

00:19:51 - 00:20:10

So, one thing I'm curious about is how do you leverage your time, in other words, how do you stop yourself getting crazy busy and lose your life in the business of a business? What are some of your top tips with that?

Rocky Buckley

00:20:11 - 00:24:10

Yeah. One of the biggest tips that I probably the most central one is to systemized your expertise. So what a lot of people do is, you know, we'll take on clients and work with them one on one and so on and we're hoping to have this ongoing relationship with someone that just, you know, it meanders and it goes on for a long time and so on because we're charging by the hour and we end up filling our calendar. That's how we're getting paid and when we haven't really clarified our expertise, positioned it properly and systemized it. We end up, you know, not charging enough taking on too many clients or clients that are in a great fit and we end up just with this full calendar and I was there for many, many years. I was capped out with what I could really make. I was the business. I positioned myself as the business. I was, I couldn't be removed from the business. I was essential to it. So it was at a business model level that I really hadn't systemized what I knew and turned it into a format that gave me leverage, right? So that's what I think a lot of people haven't done is they haven't really identified their expertise and clarified it and specified at a point to extract its highest value. First of all, they could charge the most for it, but secondly, turning it into some kind of a system that could be delivered in a one to many sort of model. And I think that's really the leap that a lot of people need to make. You can't go one too many until you really systemize what you know, that's the liberator because when you systemized what you know, you can basically take your knowledge and put it into leverageable frameworks or formats, such as video courses and stuff. So this is the classic, you know, group coaching model or, you know, creating courses and things, but you can't get to that level until you really do the work of figuring out what is it that I know? How do I properly framework that in a way that people can learn and they can get it quickly, right? So there's a lot of people that like they coach people and so on, but they've never taught anybody, they've never really learned the art and the skill of teaching. And so like it's a mess, you go into a program and it's like all this stuff is disorganized. None of it because they don't come out of that kind of a background, they've never gone through instructional design principles. They don't really know how to create curriculum and training and so on and it ends up being a mess. And I think what happens is, you know, you need to be able to extract the knowledge out of your head and organize it into a linear framework that you can take someone else through that they can understand that they get where there's feedback loops built into it. So when a person is struggling, there's a way to intervene and help them at that point. And so there's a whole process that I think is the secret to making that leap. From sort of a one-on-one kind of business where you're trading time for money, you're capped to being able to make that leap where your video content, let's say does most of the heavy lifting in your business, you know, and you show up a couple of times a week and you coach people in a group setting or something. That's where you can have that liberator effect where in a few hours a week you can be really managing a lot of clients all in one shot because you've set it up properly in a certain way, you've turned what you know into a system. And I think that has so many benefits, not only from a business model perspective, but also from a marketing perspective, because when you can offer people a system, it feels like it's a magic bullet, it feels like you've really got this down to a science because you've got it down to, let's say a three step or a four step system that you can take people through. It creates a lot of authority, it creates a lot of belief and people really, you know, sense that okay, you really know what you're doing when you can present what you know in that kind of a detailed way, so I hope that makes sense.

Jeff Bullas

00:24:11 - 00:24:34

Yeah, yeah, totally, I think and this is what a lot of, especially because you're really in a lot of instances you're helping people that are coaches, for example, aren't you? So and a lot of coaches and consultants have a lot of expertise, but it's just they have to do that one on one, which is trading time for money and there is no leverage in that because you've only got so many hours in a week.

Rocky Buckley

00:24:34 - 00:25:24

Correct, you know, and but it's, you know, it's the trade off is if you just go to a course model, that's the problem too, because if you really care about impact, you know, that most people who buy courses, 97% of them never finished the course, so like if you actually really care about results and impact, you have to kind of have a hybrid format that allows you to take advantage of video content courses and so on, but you've also got to be able to provide those feedback loops, collaborate with people, give them a sense of community. So you need to have a multi pronged approach that can hit all of these different learning styles, different problem points and so on and really put that together for people so that they can get, you know, get results and be successful.

Jeff Bullas

00:25:24 - 00:26:00

So we talked about creating content in other words, basically, okay, what am I good at? What should I be doing? How should I design my life? What's my gift to the world? Package it up, in other words, create a product or service that can be one too many. So, what are some of the types of content that you enjoy putting together yourself? You mentioned video, you mentioned obviously a writer. So what are some of the top content that you would recommend? Especially in the, because you're talking to a lot of people who are doing business to business consulting and coaching, is that correct?

Rocky Buckley

00:26:01 - 00:28:19

Yes, I personally, really, I'm very much an advocate of kind of the model that Gary Vaynerchuk has talked about a lot is the creating one piece of core video content and repurposing that a million different ways. That to me makes the most sense is content proliferation, which also requires systems. So, but but one of the favorite things, one of the easiest things is like what we're doing right now is we've got video content from this interview. Well, I'll often take the video content. Sometimes the podcast host does not typically put their podcast out in video form, but invariably, you know, I'll ask for the raw video and I'll take that and chop it up into clips. And then those clips can be transcribed, they can be turned into all sorts of different stuff. So this is one of the easiest ways to create content is get interviewed or if you can't get interviewed by podcast hosts, interview yourself, you know, get a list of questions and answer them into a camera. And now you've got it right, you've got that core video content, chop it into clips, transcribe it, turn that into quotes, tweets. A million different things that you can do with it. But I really believe it starts there with the core video content because that can be turned into audio. It can be turned into text, images, all sorts of different stuff. So if anybody is looking for, you know, a shortcut to content to understanding this, I would probably check out some of Gary V's stuff because I think that's what a lot of people are basing their content models on anyway. I think he's probably one of the foremost thinkers in this space and now we're moving into micro content. So now it's TikTok and so you've got to, you've got to constantly be thinking about ways to take what you've already got, you don't have any extra hours in the day to create original TikToks probably so it's how do I take what I'm doing and efficiently repurpose it for all these channels? How can I take this interview that we're doing right now? For example, take this clip and turn it into a TikTok or something and again, I haven't mastered this yet, but this is, this is really, I think that the way that you have to do is have systems in place to proliferate.

Jeff Bullas

00:28:20 - 00:29:49

I totally agree. And one of the reasons I bought some podcast equipment about six years ago, I got it out, put on my desk unpacked it and then put it in a cup and I didn't see the light of day for about three or four years because I realized that I didn't have the resources at the time because if I was going to do the podcast myself, the whole process, it wasn't going to scale very well. So it was just over two years ago that I pulled the equipment out of the cupboard, I had the team by then to help me, take it from me doing, you know, the recording, the interview, the chat and also Zoom and the tools have become easier as well, like Zoom, it's fantastic, carves it up into video audio. Now there's tools that automatically create transcripts, sure, you have to edit them so you need, you know, so what I've done here, just like you mentioned is the reason why we're doing the podcast is its text audio, video, and then we carve up the interview into snippets. So it's, but the team does that for me and there's a nice robust process that involves a team, so you're totally right and that's the fun part of this and the other upside, a lot of people don't understand what the podcast and what's so valuable is that it's a relationship builder as well. Yeah, that's where it becomes really, really powerful, it's almost like the superpower of the podcast, but yeah.

Rocky Buckley

00:29:49 - 00:30:53

Do you mean that from a networking perspective, like relationship building? Well, it's interesting, I just interviewed somebody in my community who's an expert on sort of leveraging podcast into other stuff and that was one of the primary things that he was talking about was, you know, the networking that you get simply by interviewing someone or being interviewed by someone now, you and I talk for whatever, it is 45 minutes or so on and we become like friends at this point, we have a relationship now and what does that mean down the road when let's say you're promoting a product or I'm promoting a product, it's like, hey Jeff, you know, would you, how would you like to partner with me on this or vice versa.It's just and it's stealth because people, you know, they get interviewed on podcasts and it's like, what is it, what am I doing this for? Like, I don't seem to be getting anything out of this. Well, there's a system to that, it's like you kind of have to know what you're doing going in and knowing how to extract the value out of it. And I think that's the essence of any kind of content that you do, but especially in this kind of format, for sure.

Jeff Bullas

00:30:53 -00:31:44

Yeah, and that is a challenge, I think for all entrepreneurs is extracting, how do I monetize this, what does my business model look like? So for some, it might be coaching someone putting together a training course, for some it might be they want to go on the road and speak at events and I love doing that, but I don't like being on the road all the time because then it's soulless, you're just living out of a suitcase. And you're going to big conferences and some of them can be a bit soulless, you're great networking. And I had a good friend of mine, Bryan Kramer who used to be, I think he's speaking 100 times a year, whatever and he was burnt out. He put on too much word, he had serious health problems and he said enough, I've had enough of this and redesigned his life, which is essentially what you're talking about.

Rocky Buckley

00:31:44 - 00:32:11

Yeah, pretty much. It's just, can you do it, you know, in a kind of a formal way, is there a process that will be a shortcut for people instead of wandering around in the wilderness. And how do I do this? Okay, is there a linear step by step, you know, clean, uneasy to understand, it's not simple to execute, but it's simple to understand and if you can kind of just keep moving forward, you'll get there, you know.

Jeff Bullas

00:32:12 - 00:32:25

So, what are some examples without giving names of what you've, how you've helped people, some entrepreneurs, what are some great examples that you've come across and helped people with?

Rocky Buckley

00:32:26 - 00:34:22

Yeah, sure. One of my favorite examples is a good friend of mine named Jim Harshaw, who was an All American wrestler growing up became an All American, I mean became the youngest division one wrestling coach in the US, became a TEDx speaker and so on. He had created a training program and he was charging $150 for it when we first started working together. We ended up tweaking it and turning it into something that now he charges $5,000 for one day to deliver it. The same basic material. But what we did was we extracted the value out of it, aimed it at a little bit of a different audience, delivered in a different way. And now, you know, he went from a $150 course to a $5000 package that he can offer and deliver in one day. So that was a great, that was a great one. Another one is a good friend of mine, Joel McDonald, who is probably best known to the public as the author of Google AdWords For Dummies back in the day was you know, top Google AdWords expert and he had a dormant email list. It was looking to kind of, you know, have a windfall out of that list and revived that list and do something with it. And we put together a package to teach Google AdWords and with a back end service attached to it. And we basically sent out a few emails and he made $42,000 in seven days on that offer that we put together. So these are just a couple of examples of somebody else who, you know, Jessica Stallings is a, you know, an author and a consultant and had never made more than a five figure fee on any of her stuff and we repackaged it, we figured out what her positioning ought to be. We repositioned her and she was able to kind of generate her first five figure clients as a result of just some of that strategic work that we did. So those are just a couple of examples of some success stories with these kind of Platinum Path and Power Persona concept.

Jeff Bullas

00:34:22 - 00:34:50

Well that's really cool. So just to wrap it up here, Rocky, what would be the top tips in terms of going from 1-1 and sort of wandering around the wilderness, you mentioned a few key phrases, but what would he top three tips that you'd reckon anyone who wants to go from just getting the stuff out of their head and structuring it and position it. So what are the, what are some of the top tips just to help?

Rocky Buckley

00:34:50 - 00:40:11

I mean the first, I'll kind of start a little bit of more of an inner game type of area and I'll kind of combine two steps together. The first thing is I think you really need to work on yourself internally. I think you need to kind of get internally aligned. Who do you want to be, get really clear on that and believe that you can do it and you need to also open up your belief system that you actually can charge a lot more that you're worth it. So there's like identity and belief work that has to be done up front. I really believe that otherwise you're gonna sabotage yourself if you don't really get clear on yourself and believe in what you're doing, you have to have a mindset shift. I can't tell you in one or two easy steps how to do that. But that really is the preeminent thing that unlocks everything else. You have to be able to, you know, really raise your standards of who you think you can be, develop a vision of that person and start moving toward recreating your identity. So I don't believe it's about really finding your purpose in life. I think it's about creating your purpose in life. I think it's about getting clear visualizing who is that best version of yourself in the future? And getting really specific about that and then figuring out ways to move towards actualizing that person and unlocking, finding those limiting beliefs inside of yourself that say I'm not worth it, nobody will pay that, nobody pays those prices. The reality is people pay high prices all the time for things, you know, so you've got to unlock your brain in that sense and your heart. So that's really the first step. The second step is really identifying your value. You've got to understand where you are your most valuable and so you've got to become strategic about your value. Who are you serving. So an example of this might be, let's say someone is a fitness trainer or a weight loss trainer, but they're primarily working with people who need to lose 10 lbs, they feel a little sloppy, they want to kind of get in bathing suit shape for the summer. So it's kind of, they're not charging a lot because the value of that problem is it's not really that large. It's 10 lb. Feel better about yourself getting a bikini for the summer, but that's not a problem that people are willing to pay a lot of money for. There's not a lot of urgency typically behind that. So the question is, how can you like with Jim Harshaw, the example I mentioned earlier, how can you take what you're already doing and recast it where the same knowledge, the same process would be much more valuable. So an example would be there with the weight loss person instead of focusing on people who need to lose 10 lbs. What if you could basically use that same process to focus on people who need to lose 50 lb, where they actually have real health problems, right. There's a sense of urgency, that if I don't fix this weight problem, this is going to cause a massive ripple effect in my life, right. It's costing me on my job and my relationships all right, on my self esteem. I'm paying a very big price for carrying this extra 50lbs. Well, what if you were able to take your expertise and laser focus on those kind of people who had a big problem where there was urgency around it to fix that problem. So it's being strategic about your value and recasting yourself and repositioning yourself at your highest point of value. Okay, so that would be step two, step three is really the systemizing approach that we talked about earlier, how do you unlock all this stuff that's in your head, all this stuff that you know that you bring out on the fly when you're talking with someone one on one, how do you extract that out of your mind and put it into a formal process and system into a format that you can brand and label and framework and bring people through so that you can then move to this one too many format where you can teach most of the stuff in video and basically spend most of your time coaching people in more of a group format. Okay, so that so that the technology is doing the heavy lifting for you and you can really liberate and multiply yourself many, many times over through the power of technology and systemIzing your expertise, I think when you have those three things in place, it allows you to market much much more effectively because you've got a laser focused message, you've got a solution that's aimed at a very specific problem that's perceived as a very high value problem. So when you can line those three things up, it makes your marketing a lot more effective and then we can go from there on how you would actually mark it. Those are really the three big cornerstones and then you can get into things like how do you build a funnel, all that stuff, the stuff that people focus on first and that this is why the, you know, well I was told it was only one funnel away from success. Well the reason that you're and you kind of are, but you need this other stuff in place first, when you can align all of those things now that one funnel opens everything up for you, whereas it was closed to you before.

Jeff Bullas

00:40:12 - 00:40:20

I think you've summed it up very, very well, Rocky, it's really good. And how can people contact you? What's the easiest way for them to contact you?

Rocky Buckley

00:40:21 - 00:40:43

Yeah, the best places they can get in touch with me is inside of the Facebook group that I mentioned, the Facebook community, the Power Persona Project, so they can just go to PowerPersonaProject.com and jump in there and interact with me and that's kind of the entry point from that from there and then we can build that relationship from that point forward and it's free to join.

Jeff Bullas

00:40:44 - 00:41:15

So thank you very much for sharing your passion for designing a life that you love, which is what I've heard along this conversation and you actually have had to take time and reflect on it and then design it because people just don't take the time, they just get crazy busy, get busy and forget that they can design their life. So thank you for sharing us, how you can both design your life and a business that will work for your life. I think it was great to see those insights and love those three steps.

Rocky Buckley

00:41:16 - 00:41:19

Thank you so much, Jeff. I really, really enjoyed being here with you.

Jeff Bullas

00:41:20 - 00:41:21

Thanks, Rocky. It's been an absolute pleasure.

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