Personal branding is hard, brutally hard, until you build systems like this. You open the app five times to check if the post finally took off. You take one week off and the whole thing stalls. I've lived that version for years and it nearly made me want to quit. Then I stopped treating my brand like a performance and started treating it like a machine. 18 years, 48,000 pieces of content, and 17,500 founders served later and that machine reaches over 3 and 1/2 million people and runs a $15 million portfolio. Today, I'm going to hand you the five systems that the machine runs on. And at the end, I'm going to give you the final exam. One question that tells you instantly and brutally whether you've built a brand or built yourself an expensive job. System one, the one-word moat. Quick test. When people think of you, what one word comes to mind? If you can't answer that in two seconds, you don't have a brand yet. You have an account. I know when people think of me, right, things that come to mind are building a profitable personal brand and things like systems. When people think about James Clear, they think habits. Ryan Holiday, stoicism. Mel Robbins, the five-second test. And the benefit of this is that you go and you start to become a category champion and carve out your own space. So, how do you go and find your one-word moat? Well, what I like to do oftentimes is think about, you know, what is it that I love to talk about, right? What excites me? What do my customers come to me for? What is it that I can contribute to the world that the world needs the most? When you go and journal around those four questions, right, you may start to see some commonalities. And so, when you think about it, what I'd often like to do is kind of go and just jot down as many of the words that you can think of down on pen and paper. Go and actually go and survey 10 of your best clients and go and ask them, "If you were to go and describe me to a friend, how would you describe what it is I've done for you?" The second thing you want to go and understand is, "If you were to associate me with any one word or phrase, what would it be?" And now what you can go and do is compare your reflection around your one-word moat with the survey data that you get from your best clients. The word gets you remembered, but now you have to show up with something to say every week, forever. And that's where most people break. System 2 kills the hardest problem in content, never knowing what to post. System 2, the 5-year mirror. Every piece of content you'll ever need already exists. It's sitting inside the last 5 years of your life. You've just been looking in the wrong direction. When I was getting started with my profitable personal brand 5 years ago, transparently, I didn't really have a clue what I was going to talk about online. I then went and started talking to different mentors and friends and just reflecting more on what is the stuff that I've kind of learned the most over the last 5 years. I then started using this as my content strategy, essentially approaching my content as a 5-year mirror, right? So, I'm 36 right now. A lot of the content I'm putting out there is really just advice that I'd have for the 31-year-old version of myself. So, how exactly do you tap into this core system? Well, go and answer these questions in your journal over the course of the next 5 days this week and use it as your next 30 days of content. Go and ask yourself, what is a system that you've benefited from over the last 5 years that you wish you knew 5 years ago. You know, what are three mentors that have benefited you over the last 5 years? You know, are there any podcasts, books, resources that you've read over the last 5 years that really stand out? You know, what are the values that you've picked up more recently in your life that you feel permeate the way that you hire, the way that you build, the way that you approach your day-to-day that have helped you level up and become the leader that you are today? And lastly, you know, what is the advice you'd give to yourself 5 years ago? You know, when I think about these things, it's concepts like, Matt, do less but better. So, here's why the 5-year mirror works. 97% of people online never take any action. You want the action takers, the people with high agency, the people that are self-directed, that are the best kinds of clients. The beautiful thing about the 5-year test, in my case, right, is that I'm going and attracting people that kind of fit a core identity of what I'm really after. So, now you know what to post, but System 3 decides whether that content gets ignored or spreads. And I'm going to be honest with you here, okay? The math behind it scared me the first time I ran it. System three, the generosity algorithm. The scariest content decision that I've ever made is going and giving away my best systems for free, but it returns six times more revenue than everything I've ever gate kept. Let me show you the math. I hear this all the time, "Matt, if I just give away everything online, why would anyone come and pay me?" If you go and you put out just a mediocre post and you gate keep all of your knowledge behind your paywall, inevitably what I see is that post maybe gets its 5,000 views, right? And out of that, maybe you convert 10 people. On the other side of things, you get insanely generous, right? You give away the systems, you show exactly the what and how and way to do something. And you're really thinking, "What would the audience want to watch and how do I make it so good they want to share it with 20 of their friends?" What ends up happening then is the math here is that that post gets 100,000 views and gets you 1,500 leads and probably 200 customers. So, you know, 20x what you would have gotten from just making something mediocre. This is what's going to create a brand online and create what I think is the most powerful force in humanity, reciprocity. When you keep on giving, what ends up happening is people get some wins and they're going to associate you with the person that when they're ready to go and take that next step to level up, they're going to go and want to work with you. When you're building online, how do you actually create stuff that's insanely generous? Well, creating contextual lead magnets for some of the core pieces of content you're putting out there. System four, the Slack test. I don't care about views, I don't care about likes. I care about exactly one thing. Did a founder paste my content into their company Slack and share it with 20 team members? You're probably wondering, "Matt, sounds awesome. How do I go and do that?" Well, this is where the three question survey comes in. You want to go and ask your clients, "What is your biggest goal this year? What is the thing that's keeping you up at night? And if I were to help you with anything this year, what would you most want my help with?" When I've gone and surveyed folks inside of Founder to Last, I know they need help with, you know, hooks, hijacking the different algorithms on different platforms. They want to be able to get to an extra million dollars a year, remove themselves from operations. They want to be able to take their first 2-week vacation in 10 years. This is the kind of stuff that I go and then formulate into my content and answer in an in-depth way. Thereby, when I go and share that video or share that post, those people see it, it they're like, "Damn, this person's reading my mind." and they can't help but go and share it with their friends. So, no matter what level you're stuck at here, this is exactly what I help founders with inside of FounderOS. >> We just crossed over 100K in revenue for January. We've never done anything like that in any company we run that high. >> We installed the exact personal brand operating system that's helped me build a $15 million a year business and scale my own personal brand over 3 million and help thousands of founders do the same. >> What Matt put together with all the cloud stuff is nuts. >> This is insane value. I showed my head of ops and he was laughing crying as he was looking at this. >> Helping you nail your message, your content waterfall system, helping you with your content ritual, scale up your team, and all the processes required so that everything doesn't fall on your shoulders. >> See, this is the kind of stuff that lights me up. >> That's interesting you want my help and my team's help scaling up your profitable personal brand. Be sure to go and apply to FounderOS via the link in the description. Now, these four systems make your brand work. The fifth system decides whether it works without you. And that's the final exam I promised you at the start of this video. All right, it's time. System five, the disappearing act. All right, here's the final exam and it's one question. If you disappeared for 30 days, would your brand grow or would it die? If you're finding yourself working on stuff that you couldn't do for the next decade, you got to start thinking and observing those things and seeing how you can go and automate, eliminate, or delegate them. System number one of this part, right, is really going and implementing the content waterfall system. Being able to take one core idea that you have and turn it into 30 plus other pieces of content. And I'm not saying that you need to do this, right? If you're a writing-first founder, right, you likely have yourself a social writer and a newsletter writer. If you're a video-first founder, you likely have a social manager, a a video producer, and a video editor, which allows you to remove yourself from most of it, and likely just be the person coming up with some of the best ideas, and being on camera, but the rest being delegated and off your plate. So, the machine number two of this part, right, is really making sure that you have the killer email flow built out as well. The killer email flow is essentially five welcome sequence emails whenever someone signs up for your email list from a contextual lead magnet, hence the importance of step three in being insanely generous. And then four days of FOMO emails that essentially go and convert people to your product or service. That email list is driving us cash flows, which then we can reinvest into better content, and get that flywheel ripping. Machine three then is making sure that the team behind this is right. Having a high standard for the people that you bring on board. High integrity, high intelligence, high work ethic. And a key aspect to this is really making sure that every single hire you bring on board this machine, right, has gone through an intense challenge and proven themselves to be able to come on board. Often times, the question we need to ask ourselves, you know, based on you know, Dan Sullivan's book Who Not How, is who are the leaders I need to build on this team, right? Not how do I need to go and do everything. We're not stuck inside being a creator, right? We're the architect of this operating system, and we're building a true personal media company versus just some personal brand. And by the way, everything I'll walk you through lives in one place now, the Profitable Personal Brand Playbook. You find your level, you grade yourself on all seven steps of the machine, one to five, and you total your score out of 35. That score tells you exactly which step is leaking. I record a full walk-through inside, it's completely free, and the link is in the description. All right, so let's name what actually happened in the last 12 minutes. The one-word mode made you unmistakable, the five-year mirror gives you endless content, the generosity algorithm makes that content spread, the slack test aims it at the exact people who buy, and the disappearing act turns the whole thing into an asset that grows without you, which means personal branding was never some issue with your talent. Really, you should have a system and an architecture that runs not on your effort, right? But on the right operating system, right? You don't need to be the entire machine. You need a machine that runs without you. There are two kind of founders out there, right? There's ones who act as engines and then those that act as architects. One burns out and one compounds. The five systems that you now have are the entire difference between those two. Build them and personal branding stops being so hard. Thanks so much for watching this video. Be sure to like and subscribe. And if you're earlier in the climb, start with the map. I broke down the five levels of building a personal brand and exactly which one you're on in this video right here. So, go watch that one next. Thanks so much for watching and let's win together.