10x Your Profit. 10x Your Pricing. 10x Your Business. [Here's how]

• You can charge 10 times more than others and convert 10 times higher with ads.
• Six actionable steps to build your personal or business brand.
• Branding is about creating strong associations with things people like.
• Growing your audience and understanding your ideal customer are crucial.
• Success in branding requires delivering on promises and creating positive associations.

You can get people to pay you 10 times more than they pay somebody else. You can get customers to convert on ads 10 times higher than they normally do, which means it costs you a tenth to get ten times more. That's a 100x differential. And that is how massive brands print money over time.

I want to give you the six steps to building a personal brand or a business brand that you can follow. Over the last 40 months, I went from 0 to 8 million subscribers across all channels. We built our portfolio from just starting out to doing over $250 million a year by understanding this thing that took me way too long. So let's get into it.

The first two steps are conceptual. The bottom four steps will be tactical. The nice thing is that I'll give you a framework and a few stories to work through so you remember it. I think this is going to make a lot of you a lot of money and will finally bring to reality what so many people have struggled to do.

It's like, I get that Nike is this big brand, and if they just put the swoosh on a T-shirt, they can sell for 20 times more. Wow, that's really valuable. Yeah, but how do they do that? How did Apple go from just a mediocre company to becoming the titan that it is?

So if anything, even the Apple example should give you a little bit of hope that even if you are not premium today or you're just kind of figuring it out today, you can absolutely become a juggernaut in whatever industry. There are 6 steps we're going to go over, and I'm going to walk you through each of them right now.

So step number one is, what is branding overall? Branding is this big fancy word, but all it means is the association between two things. All we do is we pair. Pairing is the active verb that you do as an entrepreneur to build a brand, to build an association between two things.

Now, ideally, the thing that we pair is the thing that people don't know about with the thing they do know about, and the thing they do know about is good—something that they like. So step three, we'll get into it; we are just going to be talking about the right customer.

But for now, you have to understand what it is that we're going to be doing to begin with, repairing the thing they don't know—our business and/or us—our personal brand with the thing they do know and like, which is the good thing. If you do this over and over again, eventually you can remove the other thing, and the likingness kind of rubs off on you.

Let me show you how powerful this is. If I got up on stage and next to me are all the Republican candidates, that would shift your perspective of me a lot because there would be a lot of associations, strongly held associations, either positive or negative with that group of guys or gals.

On the other hand, if I stood on stage with all of the Democratic Party, it would give a very different perspective on who I am. Now let's do door number three. I stand up on stage with all porn stars, very different association.

The idea is that these associations, these pairings are happening every day, all the time in your business, but most of the time they're being done haphazardly. Building a brand is a lot like making a garden in the front of your house. There's a lot of weeds that want to grow there. It's natural for there to be disorder, for there to be chaos.

A chaotic brand is basically a meaningless brand because it has so many things that are not associated that makes sense, that it means nothing to nobody. What you have to do is prune the tree; you have to pull the weeds from the garden. You have to control what associations, what flowers you want to be there and proliferate.

Imagine a garden of flowers where it's all red roses. It'd be a very strong association with that one type of flower versus somebody else's where like if there's one or two roses, but then there's also some yellow flowers and some daffodils and some sunflowers. It's really tough to say, What's that? What's that garden about? I don't know.

That's what most people's branding looks like. So number one is understanding what is branding and building a brand overall. It’s just an association that we build that over time, once it’s strong enough, if I appeared 100 times in a row with porn stars, eventually, you'd just assume I'm in the porn industry, and I could remove the porn stars and I would still remain, and people would make that association; that would be part of my brand.

That's number one: what is brand? If we're going to build it, we gotta know what it is. The second is why should you bother? This is important. Fundamentally, if we think about what makes money in a business, you've got the fundamental arbitrage business, which is how much it costs you to make money.

So what that means is CAC—the cost to acquire a customer—against LTV, the lifetime value, which is how much you make over the lifetime of that customer in terms of gross profit from each customer.

Let’s say if I spend a dollar to get a customer, and that customer is going to make me $10 of gross profit, then I have a 10 to 1 LTV to CAC ratio. This is the fundamental economic unit that exists in every single business. If you boil every business down to this, it’s how much does it cost you to make more money?

That's fundamentally what investing in big businesses drives down to—the fundamental economic exchange that occurs within the business. How much does it cost you to make money?

The reason branding is so important and why you look at the most valuable companies in the world, or said differently, the most valuable brands in the world, is that they have customers who it costs them less to get.

Number one, people are willing to pay more—higher lifetime value—and they don’t buy from anyone else, which means they buy over and over and over again. If brand can allow you to convert a higher percentage of your audience, get those people to buy more times from you, get them to not buy from anyone else, and get them to do that at a higher price than the commoditized price of the marketplace, those are some very powerful things for a business. Arguably, the most important things that can’t happen in business.

Having a brand or a strong brand, with strong positive associations with your ideal audience, is one of the fastest and most powerful ways to accomplish that. If I told you you could do that, well, why would you not? If it's the most valuable thing you can do in a business from a dollars and cents perspective?

The thing is, building associations, teaching people what you are and what you're not takes time. But once you do accomplish that teaching—which is fundamentally what branding is—you’re teaching someone a pairing. The same thing like you teach a kid that don't touch the stove, it’s hot. You're trying to associate the thing you don’t want them to do with something that they don’t want to have happen.

Works the same way; we’re just doing it in reverse. So, number one: what is brand? It’s the association between two things. We do it over and over again to make sure that it’s only the stuff that we want. Then people say, Oh, this guy is the business guy, which is for me.

Now, why does it matter? We get more customers; they buy more times; higher conversion percentages, lower CAC at higher prices; and they buy again and again and again. Great. So I understand why I want to do this.

Now let’s actually start branding. This comes down to who. Whenever I have this conversation with a business owner or somebody who's a personal brand, and to be clear here, I could say, Hey, six steps to build a personal brand. I could also say six steps to build a business brand.

Believe it or not, it’s the same six steps. It all depends on who you’re trying to sell. So if you’re building your own brand, if you’re trying to sell a certain avatar, then it’s going to depend on that.

I’m going to use a very boring business—let's say I’m an accountant, I’m a CPA, and I have an accounting firm. Now, if I want to brand my accounting firm, I’m going to start with who do I want to attract? These are the qualifications that I think through when I’m thinking about my who.

Now I have a whole chapter in this book, $100 offers, that talks about this, but I’m going to give you the crash course.

So number one is I want the audience to be growing. Because if I have to pick between an audience that is shrinking and getting smaller, one that is maintaining, one that is growing, well shoot, I’d rather grow after one that’s bigger. Because even if I stay the same size, I’m still going to grow because the market is growing.

So number one, I want them to be growing. Number two—this could sound obvious—again, is I want to make sure they can afford my stuff. I want people who are making money because if I want to charge a lot of money, they gotta have the money so I can charge it again.

If I could go after poor people, medium people, or rich people, I’d rather go after people who are rich and can afford it. That’s the second qualification I have that I look for for my who.

Remember, I’m an accounting firm. I’ve got this skill set, but I need to zero in a little bit. I don’t want to be a generalist; I want to serve a specific marketplace so I can charge a premium. It makes it more operationally sound for me because I have to do the same thing over and over again rather than come up with custom solutions for every different customer who walks in the door.

Alright, the third thing I want is—hey, I want people who are very easy to target. Because if I can’t find my customers, and I’ve got people who are really easy to find vs. really hard to find, well, hell, I’d rather have the one that’s easy to find.

So we’re thinking about this in terms of basics, but this is real stuff. I want them to be growing—duh. I want them to have the money—duh. I want them to be easy to find. And finally, I want people who are in pain. I want people who actually want what I have to sell.

If they are, let’s say I’m going after a marketplace and everyone’s all wifed up, right? Not necessarily a bad thing because it means that there is demand there as a side note. But if no one wants the service, then you have a tough time selling.

So these are the four basic things: growing, they can afford it, easy to find, and they’re in pain. Okay, fantastic.

So let's walk through this. If I'm an accounting firm and I want something that's growing, I think health trends. Let’s do this together, live. I think health trends, anti-aging boomers—like this is a big market. They have a lot of money in terms of easy to find.

Okay, so what's a business that's hopping on this trend? That would be like med spas, semaglutide clinics. Cool. So let’s start with that. Let’s just say like med spas and clinics that are dealing with anti-aging for boomers. And obviously, they’re in pain from getting old because who isn’t in pain from being old? So great, so this checks all the boxes.

So now let's talk about step number four, which is now we have to figure out what they like. Remember, we're an accounting firm and we're trying to find med spas and anti-aging clinics to do their accounting for them.

What do med spas—what do those business owners like? Well, they probably like making more money, number one. They probably want to get more customers, number two. They probably want to make more profits. They probably want to build a sellable business.

Those are all things that they find—they probably want to have some help recruiting talent so that they don’t have to work as much inside the business. They probably have some issue retaining talent because finding high-quality nurses and nurse practitioners isn’t cheap. There’s a lot of demand for them right now, especially in the private market.

These are some things that they like and some of the problems they are struggling with. So if I want to build a positive brand with these people, I have to find the things they like and the things they’re struggling with.

Now what we need to do is in step five, we associate, which you can say is code for advertise. We want to pair ourselves with the solution. We want to pair ourselves to the things that they like. They like solutions to their problems. Everybody wants to be in less pain.

So that means that I’m going to probably start making content and picking off pieces by piece here. I’m going to say, “Hey, here are some things that we see across our firm for the med spas and anti-aging clinics that have helped drive profits.”

They can combine this stuff in their refrigerator, and they pack it this way so they can actually fit more in and have more room for services. Great! Here’s the second thing: how people set up their lobbies. This actually makes it more efficient so they can see more patients in less time.

I’m going to start making content in terms of videos, blogs, written formats, cheat sheets, and PDFs. I’m going to start giving this stuff away. I’m going to start associating myself with the things they want and need.

So when I start doing this, people are like, Wow, I start to like this guy because he’s making my life better. I keep making these associations between things they don’t know with things they do know and the problems they are suffering from that they like. I keep making this association over and over again.

Now, as we build this brand, we have to think about it from the perspective of the MedSpa owner. This is a simplified version of what I talk about in the leads book in the Core 4 in terms of advertising.

At the top level, you’ve got, you tell people... this is me right now, telling you. This is me advertising myself. This is me making my stuff known. That’s what we mean—you tell them. That’s the first level; it’s also the least influential, right?

If you don’t know who I am, then you might believe me to some degree. Maybe the content that I have will speak more to you than who I am. And that’s why the quality of your stuff matters so much. Because every single time there’s somebody who’s brand new who doesn’t know you, they’re going to make 100% of their judgment off of this first exchange.

If you're struggling to figure out who you want to sell to, I wrote a book, $100 million offers, that has several chapters dedicated to just helping you solve that problem. If you're struggling with the association step, which is figuring out how to actually advertise this thing—how do let people know about it?—that’s what my second book, $100 million leads, helps solve.

If you’re absolutely broke, then you can go to my podcast. They’re free. Episode 579 is where they start. If you like watching, you can go to my site, acen.com, and I have video courses on this. They’re free. You don’t even have to opt in for them. If you like the physical copy, you can go check them out on Amazon. We’ve sold over a million copies of these books, and they have over 25,000 five stars. So give them a gander; you probably won’t be disappointed.

Let’s get back to it.

Think about it like a movie. The movie company tells you that their movie is great, so they make a movie trailer. Alright, so you watch the movie trailer. Do you immediately go see a movie when you see a great movie trailer? Probably not. Sometimes they’re like, Well, that looks interesting. That looks good.

So what do you do next? Your friends tell you. You say, “Hey, that new Godzilla trailer, did you see? It looks pretty cool.” And your friends say, “Dude, I went to go see it. It sucked.”

Just like that—the movie doesn’t get my business right now. The last time I saw a movie that really took over from word of mouth was Maverick, which was the Top Gun movie. I don’t know if you guys saw that. When it came out, I felt like I got 10 different people who were like, “Dude, this is the best movie I’ve seen in two years.”

I was like, “Wow, strong.” Now, I saw the trailer, and I was like, This looks cool. But when 10 people told me to go see it, I was like, Alright, I’m gonna go see it.

What people say, what others say matters way more than what you tell them. Now, the third level here is what they experience themselves. So you make your promises, what they experience is themselves.

So at the top level, you've got a movie trailer. The level underneath that, people are like, “Hey, this is good. This is bad. This is mediocre.” The level underneath that is that I go see the movie and I make my own decision for myself.

A movie is a great microcosm of what a brand is. It’s only one product—the movie. You go see it or you don’t, and they generate cash. It’s not really a business; it’s fundamentally one chunk of media that has a ton of marketing behind it, and then they try and make another movie.

For us as business owners, we’re not in the movie business; we want them to buy again and again and again. So what we do is that when we make our promises, what we tell them, we have to deliver on the promise so that when they see our movie, they go to our restaurant, they use my accounting services, people are like, Wow, this guy really is good.

When that occurs, this completes the loop because they get this amazing experience. They believe me the next time I make a claim, and they become the people who tell other people, Hey, these guys really are good.

This creates what I call the virtuous cycle of branding: you make a promise, you keep that promise, and then people tell other people that you kept that promise. Other people try your thing, and then you keep your promise to them. And then around and around it goes.

It just takes time to get this second level where other people talk on your behalf, which matters far more than what you say. Because anybody can get someone to buy one thing one time, but it takes a business that can keep their promises as exceptional—that can get them to buy again and again and again.

So if we’re going through the steps in branding, first off, you understand branding is making associations between things they don’t know and things they do know, which is hopefully something they like.

You do it because it helps you get more customers for less, convert at higher percentages at higher prices, and get them to buy again and starve out your competition.

The who is when you start this process. You think, Who am I trying to be the ideal? If I were trying to go to MedSpa owners, it might be very different in terms of the type of content I’d be making if I were going to homeowners, right?

I’m still an accountant, but who I’m trying to make the positive association with has a very different feel to it. I could even decide I only want Republicans. It’s not a protected class, by the way. You can say you only want Democrats or only Republicans. Political parties are not a protected class.

I could say I’m only going to make content that appeals to this demographic, and I know that I’m going to ward off all the people on the other side of the aisle, figuratively.

The point is that you get the who, which in our example was med spas because it satisfied the four things. They’re growing, they’re in pain, they have the money to spend, and they’re easy to find.

What do they like? They like getting more customers; they like making more profit; they like making their lives easier; they like saving money; they like making their company sellable.

So I’m going to start making content around all of those topics. If I succeed at teaching that stuff, then they’re going to make that positive association with me, and they’re going to like me. I’m keeping a micro-rose within my content, which increases the likelihood that they think I’ll keep my macro promise—that I can help them as an accounting firm drive more profits and make better decisions in the business.

Ultimately, when they want to come to transition or sell the business, I might be the one whose financials help them make that transaction and steward it over to a new owner.

Now, the fifth step was to associate—advertise. There are three levels here: what you do—which is the Core Four. So you either make content, reach out to people you don’t know, reach out to people you do know, or you run ads.

Advertising is letting people know. Branding is what you let them know. So people get this mixed up; they’re like advertising, branding, what’s the difference? Advertising is the process of making known. Branding is what you make known. It’s the content of the advertising.

It’s what associations occur while you are making things known. You can have exceptional advertising and terrible branding happening at the same time.

The Budweiser campaign was exceptional advertising. They let the whole world know they were making an association with Dylan Mulvaney, the trans person. For their audience— for their who—that was a bad association.

So it was bad branding, but it was good advertising. We have to make sure that we can break those things apart. To be clear, for a different who, that pairing with Dylan Mulvaney might have been really good.

For a company that had a different who, that might have been a pairing that drove the sales, and it would be both good advertising and good branding. But for Bud Light’s or Budweiser’s core audience, that was an association they did not like and did not want.

It drove down sales; it was bad branding. We have to know what they like so that we can pair with that as hard as we can, and we advertise the hell out of it so as many people as humanly possible can find out about that pairing.

Finally, this is the last step of branding—the most important step. The most important step is keeping your promises. This comes down to the product. It means that the thing that you said, what you said it would do, does it the way you said it would do it by the time you said it would get done—very easy to say, very hard to do.

But fundamentally, the biggest businesses in the world—the reason Apple is Apple is because the products are exceptional. They have had ups and downs over the last 20 years, trying to figure out what their next big product is going to be. But fundamentally they have the brand they have because they have made the association with elegant, simple, easy-to-use design that makes technology accessible for everyone.

That’s fundamentally what they’ve done; that is what they stand for. And when people do buy from them, what happens? I’ll tell you the story of what it feels like.

The first time I ever had the experience of good brand, good reputation, I had positive associations with an audience, I launched something called LNS, which became like the first beta version of what would become my software company.

I did this webinar to just my existing audience. A bunch of people weren’t able to make it on because they’re gym owners and business owners. They're busy, but they knew we were going to do the build-outs for the automated lead nurturer for their gyms in the order of the orders received.

People started calling in, saying, “Hey, I missed the webinar. I have no idea what Alex is selling, but here’s my credit card. Just bill me, I’m in for whatever it is.” So think about the power of that: the only reason someone would behave that way is because they have a strong history of positive reinforcement with the brand.

Every other promise that I had made up to this point for those people, I had delivered on more than they had paid. And so if someone says, “Listen, here’s the card. I know I’m going to get my money’s worth. Just charge me so I can get in line sooner.” That’s where you want to be.

This is where all of these other kinds of direct response marketing hacks and tricks become irrelevant because you have the thing that matters most, which is a strong positive association that orients someone’s behavior towards you with a higher likelihood of purchasing more frequently, exclusively from you at higher prices.

This is why it's so important. The problem is that it’s hard because it takes time, and you have to be deliberate with it.

There’s a reason that I haven’t taken a black pill or red pill podcast. There’s a reason I haven’t done that. I don’t want the association. There’s tons of people in the porn world that reach out and say, “Hey, hop on our podcast. We get so many views!” Sure.

But the thing is, I personally, you guys know my views. I’m nihilistic in general. I don’t think anything has inherent meaning. So I don’t care what anyone does in terms of how they choose to make their money or how they choose to make their income—as long it’s legal.

But I also know that there’s a big segment of my audience that does care. And so I don’t want to disenfranchise those people. That trade isn’t worth it for me. So I don’t want to make that association—not that I have any issue with it.

Just remember that whenever you make an association, you trade a certain percentage of your audience for ideally a greater percentage of the type of people you want.

Whenever you make any change or any new association that differs from what you’ve done in the past, you’re going to lose some people and gain others.

The point of good branding is that the ones you gain are more of the who you want, and the ones you lose are the people you don’t want.

Every day you’re basically pruning this tree, weeding the garden, planting the right flowers, and taking out the wrong ones. Here’s an interesting point.

Let’s say we have this thing of roses. If you’ve got this row of flowers and that’s your whole garden—it’s just all red roses—and then a white rose pops up in the middle of the red roses, there’s nothing inherently wrong with a white rose. There’s nothing inherently wrong with me talking about my relationship with Layla, right?

But for my audience, for my who, it’s business first. I made a tiny mistake within our own business— or learning, whatever you want to call it—where there was a period of three to six months where I started experimenting with wider topics.

The thing is, I lost some audience who isn’t married—who are business owners—but why would I not want to appeal to them? My focus is business first.

I got this question, and I want to hit on it because I think it’s really good. I've said before that you are the niche. All the unique things about you create the thumbprint of your personal brand.

So how do you contrast that with saying, Hey, you want to just do the stuff that your who or your audience likes?

Here’s how I explain it: think about this as a central pillar. See this marker? This is a central pillar of my brand, which is business. That’s the central pillar of what I have.

Some people are going to be business and married. Some people are going to be business and fitness. Some people are going to be business and philosophy. Some people are going to be business and whatever other ones I have.

The thing is that business always has to be first because that’s the common thread of the whole community. If I make marriage first, then I will lose everyone that’s not marriage first.

You can sprinkle in your uniqueness of identity, but around the core value proposition that you have for your who. Mind you, this is if you have the desire to monetize a brand and do it for a specific avatar.

So if you have the accounting firm and you’re making content about how to do your books and how to be more profitable and how to set up your lobby and how to generate customers—all that stuff that you might do to help attract more med spa owners to you—you might, as a business owner of the accounting firm, be married.

That’s fine. But you’re still going to make the accounting practice and helping med spa owners the core because every one of them likes that; all of my audience likes business.

So you keep the one thing you know they all like that you have the strongest positive affinity with, with the most percentage of your audience—the key core thing.

If you’re going to go through this and you want to build your brand, you know what it is; you know why it’s important. You figure out who you’re going to go after. You’re going to make sure it is growing, easy to target, they got the money to spend, and they got the problem to solve.

You figure out the things they like. You associate yourself with those things through advertising. That’s making content, reaching out to people, and running ads and appearing next to people and with things that they find positive in general for that audience.

You do that as much as you possibly can, and that will allow you to get the purchase. Now, once you have the purchase, you either break the cycle of branding or you create a virtuous cycle of branding, which means the branding reinforces itself.

You do that by keeping your promise with the product— not over-promising, under-promising, over-delivering, and doing exactly what you said you were going to do, the way you said you were going to do it, by the time you said you’d get it done.

If you do this over time, a larger and larger audience will be customers of yours and tell other people to become customers of yours. You will be the Godzilla movie. You will be the Maverick movie where you say you’re great, but then 10 other people tell people that you’re great, and then everyone wants to buy.

Then they do see the movie, they do go to your restaurant, they do use your dry cleaning, they do go to your gym, they do try your agency services, they do sell a house with you, they do work with you.

Then they become a larger part of that pool that compounds and says they are who they say they are.