Amber was a civil engineer, and didn’t like it. She started her first business shortly after she quit that job. What followed was a dark time as her first business went bankrupt. Amber turned that around in four short years with two very large contracts in her new business. Amber will share with us how to keep your head held high in tough times, as well as how we should be branding ourselves as entrepreneurs, such as leveraging other people’s’ platforms to promote. If you enjoyed today’s episode remember to subscribe in iTunes and leave us a review!
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Amber Renae Background:
- Civil Engineer, serial entreprenuer, motivational speaker, and digital nomad
- Inspires women to re-discover their ‘Wow’ factor through presentation, personal branding and self-love
- She has built 3 six-figure businesses, featured in Vogue and other top publications
- Based in Sydney, Australia
- Say hi to her at http://www.amberrenae.com/
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TRANSCRIPTION
Joe Fairless: Best Ever listeners, welcome to the best real estate investing advice ever show. I’m Joe Fairless, and this is the world’s longest-running daily real estate investing podcast. We only talk about the best advice ever, we don’t get into any of that fluff.
First off, I hope you’re having a best ever weekend. Because it is Sunday, we’ve got a special segment, as we normally do, called Skillset Sunday. Today we’re gonna be talking to a personal branding and publicity expert. She is going to help us as real estate investors, and more importantly entrepreneurs, learn some tips for how to have more effective branding and gain more exposure for what we’re doing. With us today to talk us through that, Amber Renae. How are you doing, Amber?
Amber Renae: I’m good, thanks, Joe. Thanks so much for having me. I love that you’re all about the no-fluff approach, because that’s totally my approach as well, so I love it.
Joe Fairless: No fluff, that’s right. I was looking through your website right before we jumped on the call and I could tell that was your approach as well.
A little bit about Amber – she is a serial entrepreneur and a digital nomad; she’s based in Sydney, Australia, that’s why she’s got that cool accent. It is [7:30] AM her time, she woke up early just to – I don’t know about early, but it is early for me – talk to us, so I appreciate that.
She inspires women to rediscover their wow factor through presentation, personal branding and self-love. With that being said, Amber, can you give the Best Ever listeners a little bit more about your background and your current focus?
Amber Renae: Awesome. So my entrepreneurial journey is a bit of a rocky one, as I find most people’s are… I used to work on a construction site, building roads and bridges; I was a civil engineer. If anyone checks out my website, you would see that that kind of just does not align with my brand or who I am as a person at all.
So I quit that, and again, I’m sure a lot of your listeners are kind of going — maybe they wanna quit their jobs… Or maybe your listeners actually love their jobs, I think maybe they do. But I quit that job and I started my first business, which was a fashion design business. I started a label, it was me and a sewing machine, we were door-knocking to try to get into boutiques. Five years later we were [unintelligible [00:04:18].29] we exported to Paris, Tokyo, L.A. and South Africa, and dressed some of the biggest celebrities of the time, which back in the day was Paris Hilton, and I could assure you, it used to be cool to dress Paris.
So that was the first business. That business went bankrupt, and left me with a whole bunch of mental illness, health issues, debt… Really quite a tough time. But I managed to pick myself back up and get back on that entrepreneurial train, and I started my second business, which was a service-based business. This was fashion styling. So if you think of like a fashion editor, celebrity stylist kind of person, that’s what I was doing. And again, in four short years I went from having nothing – no networks, no contacts, I had just moved to a new city, didn’t know anyone, had never done this before, and in four years I had two of the biggest contracts in the country. I was the fashion editor at Women’s Health & Fitness, and the resident stylist at our biggest radio and TV network here.
So that was my second business, and again, it kind of came to a crashing halt. I say that the universe lovingly pushed me out of that business and into my next one, which is what I’m doing today, which is a digital marketing and education business. I now teach e-courses to female entrepreneurs – and I’ve had a few male students, but predominantly females… And I help them with becoming the face of their brand through presentation, performance and publicity.
I’ve educated about 600 people in my e-courses, and then I communicate to about 70,000 people on a global basis through my social media platforms… And it’s kind of been an awesome journey, because I’ve kind of realized that all of the skills that I’ve been learning in each of these iterations and businesses have come into culmination in this third and hopefully final one, and this is what I now have the pleasure of teaching.
Joe Fairless: So your focus is on helping with the personal brand, and you said presentation performance and publicity – did I write those three things down correctly?
Amber Renae: You sure did. You got it. Yeah, that’s right.
Joe Fairless: Okay, so can you walk us through each of these three?
Amber Renae: Absolutely. So what I realized is that there are certain things that no one else out there is teaching, and there are certain things that helped me along the way to build these six-figure businesses. Each of my businesses has hit six figures. This third one hit six figures in the first year… So I started realizing like “How was I able to do this and achieve this level of success that no one else was sort of reaching? Especially in the styling industry, people would go decades and decades of working in the industry and not get one of these contracts, and I got two in like three years. So I was sort of like, “What am I doing differently than everyone else?” and I kind of broke it down into these three areas.
Let’s look at presentation and personal branding to start off with. So if we look at — there was a study done by Dr. [unintelligible [00:06:53].00] and I’m gonna dive into a little bit of stats and figures right now… I hope you’re cool with that, Joe. I think your audience is probably okay with that.
Joe Fairless: Yup.
Amber Renae: There was this study done that talked about your overall communication message and how it’s broken down into three different parts. So you have your content, you have your performance [unintelligible [00:07:09].00] and then you have your presentation, your non-verbal cues, body language and things like that.
We found out through this study that your content actually only makes up 7% of your overall communication message, and the other 93% is based on your performance and your presentation. So I found that no one is actually teaching the missing 93%, and that’s what I’m all about, so teaching this presentation and performance… And then I actually use other people’s platforms to amplify my message, because as you know, building your own platform is time-consuming, building your own audience is time-consuming, it’s expensive, it’s laborious, but if you can just tap into other people’s audiences, you can get your message spread a lot quicker and a lot wider.
So if we look at personal branding, I guess it’s all about creating a brand that stands out from your competition, and also creating a brand that really speaks to your exact ideal customer, because what you wanna do is alleviate any confusion in your customer’s mind… Because how the buying funnel works is when your customer finds you, [unintelligible [00:08:11].22] either find me online, or they’ll find me on social media. They’ll immediately click over to the other one to see if there’s consistency. So if they find that my social channels look like my website, then they start to see consistency, and then they look for evidence of me showing up in person or in real life, on things like videos, or at live events, in podcasts, speaking engagements, anything like that.
If all three of those are cohesive and consistent, then they start to depend on me, and one my audience depends on me, then they have confidence in me. Once they have confidence, then they start to trust me, and you know what comes after trust, Joe… Sales.
So the key to increasing your bottom line is to create a cohesive and consistent, powerful online and offline personal brand, and that really is the key to increasing your bottom line.
Joe Fairless: I love the progression that you just walked us through. I never thought about it that way, when you mentioned they’re looking to see consistency and then evidence — I’ve never heard anyone say they want to see evidence of you showing up in real life or in person, but that makes a lot of sense.
So going to now how you bring it together in the presentation/performance part of it — because I get the publicity part where you mentioned you use other people’s platform to share the message, but what about presentation and performance? What are some tactical tips we can take away from this conversation and enhance our presentation and performance knowing that that’s 93% of what people are paying attention to?
Amber Renae: Great, so let’s dive into the presentation tactical tips right now… So that’s all about your presentation and your personal branding. Really some inspired actions that you can start taking today is to just start thinking of yourself through the lens of a personal brand – what makes you unique? What makes you stand out from your competition? What are you doing differently to the rest of the marketplace, and really start documenting this; really develop some brand adjectives.
A lot of people would have maybe gone through this branding kind of exercise through the lens of a graphic designer… So you might have hired a graphic designer, they might have done your brand, they’ve got your fonts together, your logo together, your website together, but they never really stopped to think about you as the person behind the brand… And if people are hiring you, Joe, then they really need to be working on your first, and that’s kind of a different approach that I take to a lot of the branding experts out there.
I really want you to look at this through what makes you different. Develop some brand adjectives around you, and then I really want you to think about a bit of a signature style… And this is something that, again, not a lot of people think about. But if you think — let’s throw back to a time that you were in a crowded room; say you were in a conference or at a speaking event, and you saw that one person that had it all going on. So you know that person – they just looked really well put together, and maybe they had a sharp suit on… They just had a really great look about them… And have a think about how you felt about that person.
Typically, we look at that person and we go “Wow, I really like what they’ve got going on. I’m really interested in what they have to say, I’m gonna give them an enhanced level of respect and authority. I’m gonna give them extra trust and credibility that I haven’t given to anyone else”, and that is really just achievable by anyone if you just show up in a bit of a signature style and develop a bit of a look about you that really is unique to you, that people can easily recognize you when you’re in that crowded room.
Joe Fairless: Is the style the way you dress only, or is it also what you want people to think of you, or how you approach conversations…?
Amber Renae: Correct, it could be all of those things, and I guess you’re moving more into the performance things, so how you approach conversations, and so on… I love that you’re already going there, because that’s exactly how it ties in – you wanna be that person who has great body language, who holds themselves with really high self-confidence and self-esteem, and all of these things are in presentation and performance, for sure. So yeah, absolutely; roll that out across all of your body language, your vocal performance, how you engage in conversations, how you treat other people as well, so they absolutely are one and the same in terms of what you’re putting out there as a personal brand.
Joe Fairless: Got it. So just for me to learn a little bit more on the performance part of things… When I hear performance, I think it is acting, and when I think of acting, then I think it is not being genuine, and then that’s not a good thing. How should I be thinking about that?
Amber Renae: Sure, so when I’m talking about performance, I’m talking more about this kind of thing – podcasting, video presenting, public speaking, Facebook live streams, Periscopes… Anything like that where you’re putting out content where you’re actually presenting to the audience – anything where you’re required to speak.
A lot of the females that I deal with – it may be a bit of a lesson I think for a lot of the males in the audience, but a lot of females have a really hard time with putting themselves out there, getting in front of a camera, getting in front of an audience, like a live event… So I deal a lot with overcoming fears of performance, so putting yourself out there, but also just giving some really actionable skills on building confidence around that.
And you know, in today’s marketplace, the world has changed. No longer can you just write a blog post or do a social media share and expect that your ideal client is gonna find you and connect with you. As a society, we crave connections, and it’s our responsibility as entrepreneurs to create a brand that connects half-way with people. The way that you do that is by creating things like this podcast, videos, doing live streams… Anything that builds authority and thought leadership, because this is the way that you ignite a movement, this is the way that you get trust with your audience.
Joe Fairless: And now the publicity part. So you mentioned you use other people’s platform to share your message… What are some tips that we can implement for getting more publicity for what we’re doing?
Amber Renae: This was something that I learned when I was a fashion designer, and I actually started that label before the interwebs… So this was before there was internet, before social media. The way that I used to try and get that brand out there – because we were a little brand, we didn’t have money for TV advertising, which was kind of the only thing that there was back then… So the way that I used to get my brand out there was just to connect with other people that had platforms and ask them to share my story in their publication.
So back then it was really only magazines and newspapers, that was it… But these days there are so many broadcasters like yourself, Joe, that are creating great content, and they’re actively seeking guests that have inspiring stories, or guests that are doing things a little bit differently to the norm, or guests that have great content that their audience would be interested in learning about. So I don’t know about you, Joe, but for me it’s really just a matter of finding people that are creating great content and reaching out to them and going, “Hey, I’m doing something interesting. Do you wanna connect?” Maybe you can give some tips to the audience as well about how you would feel if people reached out to you with certain inspiring content that they wanted to share on your platform.
Joe Fairless: Well, yeah, always open for ideas. One thing I was looking at on your website – it says “Join the 70,000 boss babes (I love this branding, the boss babes) squad here.” Does that mean you’ve got 70,000 e-mail subscribers?
Amber Renae: No, I have a 70,000 social media following.
Joe Fairless: Oh, okay. Got it.
Amber Renae: [unintelligible [00:15:30].17]
Joe Fairless: Got it. Okay, cool. I like that approach; I shall use that. I have like 5,000 e-mail subscribers, so I was gonna ask you how the heck did you get 70,000 e-mail subscribers…? Okay, so anything that we haven’t discussed as it relates to building brands that you wanted to mention?
Amber Renae: Let me see… I guess it’s just about — if you really wanna become the go-to person in the industry, I really think that if you wanna live the life that you’ve always dreamed, it’s important to start putting yourself out there and creating the content that you know that you know that you need to put out to the world. As I mentioned already, a lot of females I deal with have a really hard time of getting their message to the masses and really stepping into their greatness, and that’s really something that I help with.
A lot of that does come down to confidence, or overcoming fears and that sort of thing, but a lot of it is just things that we’ve never spoken about, like a lot of the things that we shared about on today’s call. No one is really teaching you the missing 93%, and I do think that the way that the social media platforms are going is all leading towards live-streaming, videos, podcasting, and I think that people really get to connect with the person behind the brand – I really believe that’s sort of the way that the market is going… More so away from written content. I think the way of the future for social is video content for sure, so I think it’s really important to understand how you can create great video content, or even just spoken content for your audience, so that they connect with you.
Joe Fairless: How can the Best Ever listeners get in touch with you and learn more about what you’ve got going on?
Amber Renae: I have an awesome free personal branding course that I would love to give to the listeners for hanging out with us today… So if they go to amberrenae.com/free (I’m sure you can link that up), there’s a free personal branding mini-course that really dives deep into some of the things that we spoke about today… But I do a Facebook live stream pretty much every week, so if they wanna come over to Facey, just search Amber Renae or search [unintelligible [00:17:27].28] over at Instagram.
Joe Fairless: Awesome. Did you just call Facebook Facey?
Amber Renae: Oh, yeah…
Joe Fairless: [laughs] I hadn’t heard that before…
Amber Renae: Oh, really?
Joe Fairless: I like it, I like it. There were many highlights of the interview, that was one of them. Well, thank you, Amber, for being on the show. Thanks for talking through your approach – the presentation, the performance, the publicity, the 93% of what people actually pay attention to… And then one of the main takeaways I got is that we need to be intentional about our approach and be thoughtful about how we position ourselves versus just being out there and “This is what I’m talking about” and not having consistency.
I love the funnel that you walked us through – customers wanna see consistency, then they want evidence of you showing up in real life, then they’ll depend on you, then they’ll have confidence in your and trust, and then from trust comes the sale.
Thanks for being on the show, Amber, thanks for walking us through this. I hope you have a best ever day, and we’ll talk to you soon.
Amber Renae: Thanks so much, Joe. It’s a pleasure to be here. I hope your audience got a lot out of this.
