Episode Transcript

Michael Abernathy 0:00
Hey what’s up? What’s up? What’s up everybody? Welcome back to THE a.m guys. Welcome back to five minute rants. I’m your host, Michael Abernathy. And today I’ve got Andrew Edwards on the show. What’s up, man?

Andrew Edwards 0:19
Hey, man, how are you doing?

Michael Abernathy 0:21
I’m doing really good. How are you bro?

Andrew Edwards 0:23
doing really good. We just finished with work for the day. And you just kind of invited me on the podcast.

Michael Abernathy 0:28
I did. We started talking really interestingly about brand, and how it’s so important. And Andrew and I were having a conversation for that for ourselves personally, but then also about how just applies across industries. You want to jump in?

Andrew Edwards 0:44
Yeah, for sure. We were talking about personal brand and how that’s so valuable these days, I assume it’s been valuable all throughout history. But really, in the sense of how we measure personal brand in terms of content, or social media or whatever, how that’s just pretty much valuable to a lot of people. Because it just helps with kind of establishing yourself as an authority, if you ever need to change jobs or careers, and you have a social following and some respect, or a LinkedIn, you know, a bunch of connections on LinkedIn, it’s like, it just helps with your personal brand just helps you, you know, open doors and things like that. So

Michael Abernathy 1:20
I agree, even to take a step further, like, you know, for personal life, so you think about a sales guy, if you’re in sales, you start building your own personal brand, who’s not going to want to hire you, and then how much more influence are you going to have with customers. The other thing to think about is a lot of a lot of customers, a lot of companies focus on sales, and they don’t focus on building brands. And so they do get short term sales. But then in the long term, there’s not actually scalability, because they’re behind in the game, they put the cart before the horse in a sense. And I don’t know, I don’t know if you agree with that statement. But that’s actually something I’ve been thinking about a lot, too.

Andrew Edwards 1:56
I completely agree. I think that building short term and long term is important, not just one or the other. So I think that totally makes sense. And if you’re in just like a hunt and kill type of mode, constantly, it’s like, you’re gonna deforest, or whatever it’s called when you kill all the animals around you, and there’s nothing left. Like that’s going to happen eventually.

Michael Abernathy 2:17
And that takes just as much work. Doing something like that takes just as much work as it would be to actually build a brand AKA a company a business and a business isn’t just something that it makes. In my mind. A business isn’t something that just generates revenue. But it’s like a known establishment. There’s there’s identity authority, and knowingness about it, if that makes sense

Andrew Edwards 2:40
No, 100%.

Michael Abernathy 2:41
So and I don’t know if you agree with that, either. But it just because we’ve been in this too, because you got to have sales to live as a company, you got to have sales to move forward. But at the same time, the better play is brand, but it’s not normally pursued, because it takes a lot more time to really take off unless you have a lot of money to throw at it. In a sense.

Andrew Edwards 3:03
No. 100% I mean, that’s, that’s one of the ways one of the reasons we’re doing the podcast is just really because we want to give but also because this is our brand.

Michael Abernathy 3:12
Yeah, welcome to our brand, guys.

Andrew Edwards 3:13
Yeah, this our brand

Michael Abernathy 3:14
It got personal real quick

Andrew Edwards 3:16
It got personal. I mean, and I mean, we’re talking about personal brand is like this is and this is I mean, it does take some money and time and resources to do something like this. But really, it’s not anything too crazy.

Michael Abernathy 3:29
It’s more of a commitment. I, I heard something the other day, I don’t know who said it. So they’ll have to forgive me, if you find me, you can tag me if you if you’re the one who said it, but somebody was talking about how, if you’re willing to get up in the morning and workout first thing in the morning, you are somebody who’s willing to be consistent and face adversity every day without any instantaneous result. And that’s what’s needed to succeed in life. And I agree. And that’s why a lot of people don’t actually build brands, they build, they’ll build a company, and they’ll have a sales team. And that’s really about it. And that’s why most businesses don’t actually grow from small business to medium and then from medium to large.

Andrew Edwards 4:08
Yeah, yeah, I agree with that.

Michael Abernathy 4:10
Because there’s not a brand because in order to be a large company, you have to have a brand that supports that size of business and all the infrastructure that is within that company, you’ve got to have a brand that feeds all of that supports it and keeps everything together.

Andrew Edwards 4:26
That totally makes sense. That totally makes sense and thinking about this and this may be content for another podcast but What is the definition of a brand?

Michael Abernathy 4:36
Well do you want to stay on for a second, we can actually define it

Andrew Edwards 4:39
Let’s do it.

Michael Abernathy 4:40
And well guys, as we wrap up because we got like 15 seconds left, and I listen I apologize for all the times I’ve gone over I do try and actually end on time it’s hard because see we’re already out of our 15 seconds. So anyways guys, Andrew and I are going to stop this one and probably just start another one and we’ll see you in the next episode. Peace Peace