Isaac Mashman of Mashman Consulting Group: Insights Into Effective Scaling Strategies
Isaac Mashman is the founder and CEO of Mashman Consulting Group, a leading firm specializing in personal branding and reputation management. With a background in public relations, digital strategy, and branding, Isaac has cultivated a global presence, helping high-profile entrepreneurs, public figures, and small business owners establish and grow their personal brands. His expertise lies in Identity Positioning, a unique strategy designed to amplify personal visibility and long-term influence. Known for his forward-thinking approach and relentless drive, Isaac is committed to transforming the personal branding landscape while scaling Mashman Consulting Group into a global authority. Isaac is also the author of Amazon’s #1 New Release in Public Relations, Personal Branding: A Manifesto on Fame and Influence, owner of Mashman Investments and Mashman Properties, and acclaimed podcast host.
We are thrilled to have you with us today! Welcome to this exclusive interview. Let’s begin with a brief introduction. Please tell our audience a bit about yourself and your company.
Isaac Mashman: Thank you for the invitation to be here today. My name is Isaac Mashman and I am the founder of the consulting firm, Mashman Consulting Group, out of Little Rock, Arkansas. We specialize in personal branding and help emerging and established public figures optimize and scale their own. This is my current focus and vehicle as I continue to grow my own presence and authority. Several years ago, I saw a blue ocean opportunity in this space. There was no shortage of people working with businesses, but what about the business owners? Not a fan of the DFY model, I became the go-to person in my friend group and quickly realized I had a natural ability to speak and was effective at consulting. The journey to get here was definitely not easy, but in my pursuit of clarity, I went from business to business, eventually landing in this space.
What were the most significant challenges you faced during the scaling process, and how did you overcome them?
Isaac Mashman: Systems and automation, by far. This is a challenge I believe most serious business owners encounter, and in my previous ventures, I never had them in place. When I launched Mashman Consulting Group, I knew that it needed to behave as its own living organism. From our CRM to task management, email marketing, brand strategy, and proper software attribution for our consultants and team, the challenge was #1 cost-effectiveness and #2 implementation. I have set the public goal of making MCG the top personal brand consultancy worldwide and having a team of 500 trained consultants by 2035, so having an internal structure in place was paramount. The rise of artificial intelligence has also aided us in research and cross-referencing strategies. By leveraging AI tools such as ChatGPT, tasks that previously took hours now take mere minutes.
How did you ensure that your company culture remained intact as your business expanded?
Isaac Mashman: With a vision and 7 core pillars. I’ll outline them below:
- Consciously building your personal brand is a requirement. We must lead by example if we expect our clients to follow suit.
- Take the macro approach to personal branding and individual reputation management.
- Focus on the client’s highest-value problems, first.
- Being brutally honest may hurt our clients’ feelings, but will have the best results in the long run.
- Neither we nor the clients are right 100% of the time. Always use objective analysis to draw the best conclusions.
- Our work and strategies in their entirety must be ethical.
- Being brutally honest may hurt our clients’ feelings, but will have the best results in the long run.
One of the requirements, the paramount one at that, for all of our consultants is that they have to build their brand and execute the strategies that we tell our clients to implement. Practicing what we preach, so to speak. As we land more clients, they should be able to look at the person guiding them and validate that these steps do, in fact, work. By setting the vision of being the world’s #1 personal branding consultancy, we all have something to build towards. Our success is closely aligned with the success of our team, and vice versa.
What strategies did you employ to maintain quality and customer satisfaction while scaling rapidly?
Isaac Mashman: Before we take on any client, we have an intensive onboarding survey that consists of 30 questions addressing the client’s highest-value personal branding problems, their goals, their problems, and their driving forces. Since launching this, we have been able to collect data on the most common focus areas and tailor our specific strategy in a more efficient manner. This speaks to managing expectations. We will never make guarantees we cannot keep, so for example, if a client wants to land an article in Forbes or grow to a million followers in 30 days, we can tell them that they are more likely to hit this over the span of a year, instead. Setting clearly defined expectations that can be strategically achieved ensures the client feels like they’re getting the most out of our consultations and aren’t being over-promised.
Can you share a specific turning point that was crucial for your business’s successful scaling?
Isaac Mashman: Implementing legal red tape. I am naturally a trusting person, and a mistake I made was not having refund policies and other agreements in place. This applies not only externally, but internally as well. We set clearly defined roles, responsibilities, and expectations for our clients and our consultants. You would think everyone has your best interest at heart; however, contracts and policies will protect you in the unlikely circumstance you come across a “snake” or unethical person.
How did you manage the financial aspects of scaling, particularly in securing funding and maintaining cash flow?
Isaac Mashman: Mashman Consulting Group is a bootstrapped business, and I am the 100% sole owner. How can you have a business with your last name and not own it fully? This made it challenging in the beginning stages; however, as clients began rolling in, I directed all of the funds toward investments in our systems and automation as previously discussed. Our consultants also get paid on a commission structure where a percentage is paid to them, and the rest to the firm. We take all of that revenue and apply it to overhead to keep the things paid for that they rely on for their work. This is sustainable as they know without commissions they are weighing the company down, as well as keeping them motivated to perform with the incentive of higher commission cuts based on performance.
Jed Morley, VIP Contributor to WealthDefined and the host of this interview would like to thank Isaac Mashman, for taking the time to do this interview and share his knowledge and experience with our readers.
If you would like to get in touch with Isaac Mashman or his company, you can do it through his – Linkedin Page
