[00:00:02] Speaker A: Welcome to Big Ticket Pros, the podcast for agencies, coaches and high end service providers who know what it takes to thrive in competitive markets. I'm your host Ana Gonzalez and you can find me on social media at Annabelle Prime. Our guests share insider tips, strategies and sometimes cautionary tales to help you close bigger deals and scale your business faster.
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[email protected] that's conversationalfunnels.com Today's guest is Leonard Shanier.
Leonard Shiner has worked with numerous Fortune 500 companies, boutique professional firms and industry experts for over a decade, developing memorable brands, creating valuable online authority, and scaling new business to productively grow the top and bottom line for his clients.
Often Leonor has been at the creative and strategic epicenter of dramatic revenue growth and business transformation. So Leonor, welcome to Big Ticket Pros.
[00:01:22] Speaker B: Thank you so much for having me.
[00:01:24] Speaker A: Thank you so much for being here. So what is the best piece of advice you would give to someone just starting out in your industry?
[00:01:32] Speaker B: Yeah, that's a really great question and it really opens the door to so much that we could talk about. But I would say if you are someone, if you're a professional and you are looking to start an agency or if you're, you're a marketing professional and you're in that, in that stage where you're working for a 9 to 5 and maybe you're in corporate, maybe you're in a full time job and you're looking to go out on your own, the best piece of advice that I could say is to create a brand.
And I know that that might be a little simplistic, but what I mean by that is created, create a personal brand for yourself.
Because we don't know what, what agency you're going to create in the future. We don't know what, what offer you're going to create. Maybe you don't even know what type of person you know what type of business you're going to be solving problems or doing marketing for.
But what we do know is that your personal brand is going to follow you from a different job to a different role, to a different conversation, to a different it follows you everywhere. So the work that I did when I was first starting out to solidify my own personal brand, I got a website that had my name. My email is at that same thing. I made sure all my social handles, everything is the same.
[00:02:56] Speaker C: Right.
[00:02:57] Speaker B: I. I showed up to the stage and had the spotlight be on me for a moment.
[00:03:02] Speaker C: Right.
[00:03:03] Speaker B: And are all those things used today? Yes. Were they all used back then when I was creating them? No. I had no clue what I was doing. But I was setting the foundation. I was putting the building blocks in order for being able to show up and do podcast guesting interviews, to be able to go and be on stage, to be able to, you know, when people book a consultation with you, what's the first thing they're going to do? Probably the first thing you do, they're going to Google you. And so we want to have enough results that come up and that doesn't happen overnight. It takes some time for you to be the entire first page of Google. So I would say create your personal brand first and foremost.
[00:03:48] Speaker A: That's super interesting. And I think that some people can say, oh, build your brand, like colors, logo, website, whatever, but building your brand, personal brand, is something completely different and I think it makes a lot of sense. I love that you said that your personal brand will follow you everywhere and as long as you're authentic, I think that authenticity sells.
Now, you mentioned build your website, your email, your social handles, all of them have to be the same. What tactical advice can you give to people who are starting to build their products, personal brand?
[00:04:32] Speaker B: Well, I, I would probably say somewhat along the lines of, of keep it all the same. Right, that, that's definitely true. And the reason being is that if, if I was Leonard Shiner on one platform and then Leo Shiner on another, and then Lenny Shiner on another, and then Len Shiner and then Leonard J. And I've got all of these different variants.
One of the most important things that I did in the beginning was that I chose what version of my name I was going to be using.
[00:05:06] Speaker C: Right.
[00:05:07] Speaker B: It's not the exact version that, that's, you know, on your birth certificate.
[00:05:10] Speaker C: Right.
[00:05:11] Speaker B: But it's a name that you can uniquely identify by now. Stay with me here for a minute. So my name is quite unique.
[00:05:20] Speaker C: Right.
[00:05:20] Speaker B: I chose to not have the middle initial because it just seemed a little too cumbersome. So rather than Leonard J. Shiner and always being introduced as Leonard J. Shiner, I chose Leonard Shiner. There's not another Leonard Shiner currently on the planet. So that's a pretty good and unique identifier for myself. But what about, you know, Anna? What about yourself?
[00:05:48] Speaker C: Right.
[00:05:48] Speaker B: There's probably a handful of other. Anna Gonzalez is right.
[00:05:53] Speaker A: That's what I was thinking.
[00:05:54] Speaker B: Yeah. So. So how do you be unique? How do you do that?
[00:05:57] Speaker C: Right.
[00:05:58] Speaker B: Well, first of all, you are unique in and of itself.
[00:06:02] Speaker C: Right.
[00:06:02] Speaker B: But then how do we package that in a way? So for you, it might be, you know, Anna on the mic.
[00:06:09] Speaker C: Right?
[00:06:09] Speaker B: It might be Anna G on the mic.
[00:06:11] Speaker C: Right.
[00:06:12] Speaker B: So you have ways that you can create a personal brand and if your name is, is not super unique, there's still ways that you can identify yourself as a personal brand specifically.
And the benefit of doing that is again, when someone searches for you, all of your stuff is going to come up.
[00:06:34] Speaker C: Right.
[00:06:34] Speaker B: And you would kind of reiterated, underscored what I said about them being all the same. And the reason is that even if it's like capital letter, lowercase letter, that type of thing, because I do branding for our clients at the agency and Google doesn't necessarily see the same word as the same word if there's capital letters versus lowercase letters because it's all ones and zeros at the end of the day. And a capital L for Leonard is different than a lowercase L.
And so we want to make sure that we've got that consistency. So that search is pulling in everything as it should be versus missing some of the fine minor details out there.
[00:07:21] Speaker A: That's pretty interesting.
What I take away from this is choose how you want to be recognized.
Choose your name and put it everywhere.
Make it, make it, I will say make it a blanket so that people, when they look for that name, you appear everywhere.
Did I get that right?
[00:07:47] Speaker B: Exactly.
[00:07:49] Speaker A: Well, thank you so much for this. Yes. Just keep it all the same.
So Leonard, tell us about who you serve and how people can reach out to you.
[00:07:59] Speaker B: I serve business owners who are looking to increase their presence, increase their authority and gain new clients new. New clients, new patients, new buyers, whatever we want to call them. So I run Geek House, which is a PR and marketing agency in based out of Los Angeles. And we're most of the time helping lawyers and doctors and some other service based professionals.
[00:08:28] Speaker C: Right.
[00:08:28] Speaker B: So consultants, coaches, you know, like a real estate agent.
So we're helping the service based professional package themselves because we know that, you know, how do we distinguish between lawyer A and lawyer B? Who's better?
[00:08:45] Speaker C: Right?
[00:08:46] Speaker B: Well, we might look at the school they went to or their track record or honestly we would probably look at their website and See which one feels more set up, right? Like, we're really inferring a lot. So we're helping that type of clientele overcome just being compared by a website or just being compared by, you know, some ancillary details. So we're helping them position themselves as an expert, get featured in the media. So whether that is, you know, national level, like Bloomberg, abc, Fox, or it's the local level, like the local ABC station, right, like ABC4 or something like that, or maybe even the local newspaper. So from local to national print to digital, that's what we're helping our clients do. And that is one of our strategies to get more credibility, more authority. Now then we use that to really pour some gas on the fire of our marketing, right? So if you saw, you know, a billboard or you saw an ad and then it said, you know, as featured on Media Logo, Media Logo, Media Logo, you look more credible. You look like someone who is the distinguished expert. And so that's, you know, two steps of our, of our larger method of how we get to have our clients be positioned well as experts and then drive traffic, drive leads to the, to the business, whether it's a doctor, a law firm, a real estate agent, whatever that might be.
[00:10:22] Speaker A: That's right. So how can they find you?
[00:10:25] Speaker B: We are on online, so you can obviously find us at our website, which is Gogeek House.com. so go and then geek, G, E K and we spell house a little bit different, H, A U s.
So gogeek house.com and I'll also offer anyone who is listening. And if you're thinking, I want to do that, I want to get more authority, I want to be perceived as more credible. When people search me on Google, I am hosting a semi regular training these days called the Podcast Guest Intensive.
And it helps people who are kind of like me, right? We're experts for something specific and it helps other people to package their knowledge so that podcast hosts, as well as media hosts and journalists and editors can view you as an expert. So we go over, you know, a magnetic media bio, how to pitch, where to pitch, templates of pitching, and it's a really great intensive. It is an intensive. It's an intensive workshop and you can register for that for free atpodcastguest intensive.com.
and I would probably say too that if you're interested, you've got a friend, right? Like a business buddy who's interested too.
Let them make the decision whether they want to register too, and then you can do it together, right? We always find that when you've got the buddy system, you're more likely, you're more accountable and you're more likely to actually take action. So you can register for that for free podcast Guest intensive.
[00:12:05] Speaker A: Com Fantastic. So we're going to wrap it up here. Thank you Leonard for joining us and sharing some wisdom about thriving in a competitive industry. You can learn more about what Leonard does by visiting gogeekhouse.com h a u S and if you want to gain more authority, go to podcastguestintensive.com bring your buddy with you.
If you are an agency coach, professional services provider or otherwise sell expensive stuff, we'd love to have you in a future episode. Go.
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[email protected]. that's all for now. Go get that big ticket punched. See you later.
