Lessons - Making a Strong Personal Brand | Joe De Sena - Founder and CEO of Spartan

I want to switch gears for a second and just pick your brain about some of the stuff you done with your own brand because you've built a really good one and you've had a podcast or you still have a podcast, you've interviewed what, six, seven hundred people, like a lot of people. You wrote a book. What are some of the lessons that you've learned when you've been building out your own brand? What has it done for you? How has it helped? I know you're doing a lot of this during COVID too, you're doing vlogs and whatnot. So give a rundown on that because you've done this at an amazing scale, people can learn from you too. Yeah, so everybody, everybody wants to build a personal brand, you got to write a book. You don't have to charge for the book, you don't have to get it published, you could give it away for free. How do you write a book, write a page a day, write one page a day, go back after a year, you got three hundred, you know, edit it, shrink it, whatever, but one, everybody could write it a page a day. Today with an AI, you could probably write two pages a day, so it's so easy, you just go and look at it. If you're not careful. Yeah. You write a page a day and the reason you need a book is because you got to believe in something, you got to stand for something, what's that philosophy, why are you doing what you do? And it gets you airtime, it gets you the ability to talk to folks, to become interesting, et cetera. You got to have a book, podcast is great for me because I learned stuff, talking to you I learned, right, hopefully you talk to me, you learn. And so selfishly, really good for me to have the podcast. I don't really have a lot of time to do podcasts, I kind of squeeze it in, hopefully in the next year, I want some fully back on my feet coming out of COVID with this damn company. I'll have, I'll have people running the business more day to day the way it was pre-pandemic and I could focus more on that, on that media. Making videos, that was a mistake I made, I started doing this a long time ago, I could have been massive on social media, but my instinct in 2007, my instinct in 2007 was, you know what, I'm the anti social guy, I'm on the farm, I'm on the farm in Vermont, you want to learn, you come to the farm, so I just, I wasn't into it and I stood against it, but now I realize that if I do want to change lives, I've got to somehow reach people and pull them into, you know, tickle them, get them excited somehow. Has it, has it, I mean, like now, like a post pandemic, obviously pandemic, just was brutal for, for everything you were working on, I think you had to lay off a significant amount of people, do you notice that sort of rebounding from the pandemic, like leading into the personal brand, has it been a big help to the business or has it been a distraction? Like just walk me through all the shit that you went through during the pandemic and after because that's a really, I'm still going through it to disaster. I sold $50 million worth of tickets by the time the pandemic hit and shut the country down, I already sold $50,000, $500,000 tickets, I couldn't deliver on those tickets because every race around the world got shut down. I had $500,000 customers that wanted to torch me, burn me, you know, tar and feather me alive because they had trained and they paid for their race, they wanted their money back, they wanted a race, couldn't believe that I listened to the government and I shut the races down. I did the right thing, I gave everybody two tickets, I said when the, when the world opens back up again in two weeks, four weeks max, everybody would get two races for every one race, took me two years to get the races open again. What I failed to realize was I gave away $100 million worth of tickets so when the race has opened back up the first $100 million, remember you didn't come in, those were all free. That was a disaster. So I had accumulated all these bills and all these headaches during those two years that then I had to contend with starting in 2023. Last year the Wall Street Journal called and I think it was August and they said, hey, we want to do a story. We heard you're having a tough time paying your bills. We'd like to do a story in the cover of the bankruptcy section of the Wall Street Journal. I said, oh, that's great. That's really helpful for society. I'm trying to get people healthy, signing up for events. You want to do a story around how Joe can pay his bill so that you get more clicks to your magazine genius. Obviously, I was upset, but then I thought, you know, it's really just the universe testing me, the universe pissed off that I made so many people do burpees all these years. This is just a test universe to be grateful. So I somehow pushed through. We are much, much, much better than we were when we started the journey coming out of COVID, but I'm not quite there yet. But I mean, listen, like I think that decimated everybody and I don't think there could have been a worse business to be in than what you had during COVID that, like you couldn't do anything. I'm assuming. And do anything.