Build a power persona and make your platinum path to success with these programs designed for solopreneurs
By Jim James, Founder EASTWEST PR and Host of The UnNoticed Entrepreneur.
Rocky Buckley has been helping companies and entrepreneurs redefine their brands, and he has generated over $100 million worth of business. In the new episode of The UnNoticed Entrepreneur, he talked about two programs he offers â one for the company; another for the entrepreneur.
Image from LinkedIn
A Strategic Approach to Getting Noticed
Many people approach getting noticed from purely a tactical standpoint â they put out a lot of content. Rocky does things differently: He steps back a bit further and thinks about it strategically first.
He works with entrepreneurs inside out. As an entrepreneur, you have to start with your life vision and get really clear on what you want in life. Then, use that crystal clear vision to define your objectives and vision for your business.
From there, he will help you determine who you want to become in light of that vision. Who do you want to be in the next two, five, or ten years? Then he will guide you in strategically crafting and designing a public persona congruent with that vision.
Image from Unsplash
Before you can do all the tactical approaches â going live on Facebook, putting out a lot of ads and content â thereâs a need to build a core foundation. A lot of people fail to do this even though itâs where the power of being a public figure lies. What are those aspects of you that release your natural passion and your charisma? What are the things that make you resonate and attractive to other people?
Rocky tries to tap into that sense of purpose and passion that brings out your personality and your best sides. For him, itâs that X factor that would make people going into a crowded marketplace stand out and resonate with others.
For some, it comes very natural. They have that natural charisma and immediately pop and stand out in the market. But for most of us, that doesnât happen. It requires stepping back and becoming strategic about who you want to be for whom â and how you position yourself as unique and different in the market.
Knowing Your Vision and Being Systematic About Achieving It
The journey of an entrepreneur isnât necessarily a consistent one. They may start a business, take it to a certain level, and then transition out of it. When helping entrepreneurs go through that change, Rocky asks: What do you want?
A lot of entrepreneurs start businesses because theyâre good at something. They want to be their own boss, and theyâve seen the opportunity to do so. If theyâre lucky enough, they get busy right away, and their business starts to take on a life of its own.
There also comes the point wherein about ten years into their business, entrepreneurs would find out theyâre not happy. Theyâre successful and doing well but dread getting up in the morning every day and doing their business.
If youâve already built the basic business skills needed to be successful, you may ask: Whatâs the next level for me? How do I package financial success with lifestyle success, happiness, and feeling fulfilled â that Iâm making an impact in the world?
This underscores the importance of life vision that he has previously mentioned.
Upon knowing your purpose and what you want to become, youâll have a basis for a business that will make you happy and the best version of yourself. Because when you really love something and are passionate about it, thatâs when youâre going to become great.
Once you determine what you want to be and what you want your business to look like, you can start reverse engineering. How do I get there? And that involves a lot of looking at the market â knowing whoâs currently out there and how you can position yourself as someone different.
This is where you become very strategic. Itâs about being very calculated in designing what kind of outcome you want and executing that. It takes a system and a process to be able to engineer that.
Image from Unsplash
Creativity and having systems and processes are both critically important. But if you start at a systems level, it will allow you to understand the process of how you can become the person you want to be. Whatâs the system for you to get there? It comes down to figuring out yourself, your market, and your message.
From a business model perspective, it also lets you think about: How do I actually want to monetise this? Do I want to be a speaker? Do I want to create digital products? Do I want to run a community? You have to find out what you really love, what youâre good at, and whatâs going to inspire you every day. All this will inform the business model, which is the one youâll execute.
Based on observation, Rocky found that most entrepreneurs start by figuring out how they can make money and chase after many shiny objects. Then, theyâd realise that it actually doesnât work for them or theyâre not happy.
Whatâs more effective is to go back and build things from the ground up â know what you want and take it all the way to the execution level. Itâs a system that will ultimately get you everything you want, including the finances, the lifestyle, the impact, and the fulfilment.
On Personal and Company Brand
In some cases, an entrepreneur would want to transition out of their business and, at the same time, would need to build a brand that could be an extension of their personality. This poses a structural challenge because their customers and employees may find it hard to imagine the two (the personal and company brand) not being together.
For Rocky, it ultimately depends on what it is that you want out of your business.
Some people run their businesses but are not necessarily the face of their companies. They built those successfully, yet no one knows who they are. But they do want to become public figures. They want to share with the world what they have learnt. Theyâre being legacy-minded prompts them to want to leave an impact.
Thereâs also another direction where one starts as a solo entrepreneur. Theyâre the face of their brand. And when their business becomes successful, they find that they canât sell it because theyâre integral to the brand.
These are two different directions from where you can come from, but they should be seen as complementary. You should be building your business to sell. You don't want to create a job that you're essential to â to the point that when you stop working, the money also stops coming in.
Image from Unsplash
Ideally, youâd want to be able to pair being a personal brand with businesses and properties that you can sell to other people at the end of the day. And thereâs a strategic process to do that.
If youâre a personal brand and want to transition out of your business, you must create properties that have branded names outside of yourself. It could be a money-based membership community or courses or seminars that wonât have your name on them. Over time, you can bring in other partners who will help diffuse the business away from you.
In doing that, you can abstract yourself out and sell your business â and many entrepreneurs have already done that successfully.
On the other hand, if you started as an unknown part of your brand and want to become known, you have to think about: How do I leverage my business success and, for the first time, become a personal brand? How do I start positioning myself?
These are some questions that have to be addressed strategically. Again, it comes back to knowing what you want to be, who you want to serve, what will make you the happiest, and where the opportunities are, financially speaking. Though thereâs a lot of consideration, itâs really a question of How do I this? After that, it becomes a process of execution.
Platinum Path and The Power Persona Project
A few years ago, Rocky primarily worked with corporate clients, and that business has become successful. But he realised that he wasnât happy. So he thought about how he can work with people he cares about. That made him shift his business model to work with solopreneurs who have high-value knowledge, passion, and expertise. Heâs now focused on helping these people to succeed in business and build a great life out of that.
For that, he designed two programs that run parallel to each other: Platinum Path and The Power Persona Project. Theyâre complementary and congruent sets of intellectual property he developed for solopreneurs.
Screengrab from www.rockybuckley.com
His Platinum Path program is about helping solopreneurs reinvent their business model, shift into a high-price model, and package and leverage their time to build a much more successful business â one thatâs lifestyle-friendly and gives them a lot more impact. Itâs basically a protocol for positioning yourself as a top expert in the field, being able to command premium prices, and packaging your expertise in high-priced programs and properties.
The other, The Power Persona Project, is about the public figure. How do I design my public persona to be the most magnetic, charismatic, and resonant with the marketplace?
When paired, these two programs will guide you on how to have a high-priced, premium personal brand. One program is about the personal brand, and the other is more about the actual business model structure that supports that.
Documenting Your Systems and Processes
If you have the expertise, the key to liberating yourself from your company is to extract the knowledge out of your head or out of the head of your company and create systemised processes that you can package and brand.
If youâre serving clients one-on-one, have you ever documented your systems? Have you created intellectual property? The intellectual property of your systems and the training programs will take your knowledge out of your head and help you shift from a one-on-one time-for-money format to a digital format that can greatly expand your leverage.
By putting your knowledge into a digital course or book, for example, you can give everybody around the world potential access to your knowledge. It's the way to leverage yourself and multiply yourself an infinite number of times throughout the world.
Image from Unsplash
As most entrepreneurs arenât salespeople and do not always feel that theyâre charismatic, Rocky recommends reading resources like âWork the Systemâ by Sam Carpenter and âThe E Mythâ by Michael Gerber.
Books and properties like these can help you go through that process of stepping outside your business and looking at every piece of it as a system. Because thereâs a need to notice what it is amongst what youâre doing that makes the difference.
A lot of us have expertise. We're so good at what we do that we become unconscious about why we're good at it. We never step back and realise which things make what we do really effective.
Rocky emphasises the importance of stepping outside yourself, documenting and recording what youâre doing step by step â in a linear process â and turning that into standard operating procedures. This process will help you understand what you do, extract your expertise, and be able to share it with other people.
If it's just locked in your head, it wonât do any good for anybody else. Essentially, you want to be able to transfer your knowledge.
Getting Himself Noticed
During the first 20+ years of being in business, Rocky himself has gone through all these processes that heâs discussing. He wasnât a public figure; he was behind the scenes. He had big clients and worked with them from a consulting standpoint. But he had not built any social media and was not well-known at all.
He had to build from the ground up. And he knows that heâs still in the fairly early stages of becoming known.
A couple of ways he has done this is by gradually building his social media presence on Facebook and LinkedIn. He also appears as a guest on different podcasts, partnering with some big entrepreneurs.
Image from www.rockybuckley.com
Recently, he also went on a campaign with Tony Robbins and Dean Graziosi on their Time to Thrive Challenge. By building relationships and partnerships with people who are big names, he hopes to be promoted in the process.
The hard part of situations like Rockyâs is really figuring out who you want to be. But once you know that and get your messaging and branding clear, it will be a mechanical and mathematical process from that point. How do I get myself in front of X number of people every day?
You can execute this in many ways. For example, content marketing and content repurposing. You can get into all kinds of tactics once you have a congruent message and project a clear signal out into the market.
A lot of people jump right into the tactics first, and they find they're not resonating with anybody and it's not working. What they have to do is step back and see whatâs wrong. Once you know all that, itâs all execution and outreach. For instance, how many podcasts do you want to appear on? If you figured itâs 100 podcasts, itâs all about going through the mechanical process of reaching out and becoming a podcast guest.
To learn more about Rocky, his programs, his membership community, and Platinum Path masterminds, visit www.rockybuckley.com.
This article is based on a transcript from my podcast The UnNoticed Entrepreneur, you can listen here.
Cover image by Miguel Bruna on Unsplash
