What Personal Brand Really Means

I asked Tony when he started building his personal brand.

He's had some online experience for about 20 years, very minimal in terms of really getting out there and building a personal brand.

"Let's talk about personal brand for a minute, because I know when I first heard that term, and even if I hear it today, I kind of cringe. I'm like, I don't want a personal brand. I'm not some sleazy salesy."

That's what a lot of people think when they hear that term. But just think of it as your reputation.

At some point it changed from reputation to personal brand, but really your reputation is everything. Jeff Bezos, the creator and owner of Amazon says your brand is what people say about you when you're not in the room.

So just think of it that way. Your personality. That Tony guy, he's great. He always calls us back. Or don't call that Tony guy, man. He doesn't take care of his problems.

"You got to be careful with how you curate and develop your personal brand."

A good personal brand could take years to build, but it could take one moment to smash through the service you provide to your customers and things like that.

In terms of building a personal brand online, that's somewhat new to him. He's only been doing that for about six years now.

The Secret: Nobody Cares About Your Business

I asked Tony how he found so much success when a lot of other people post a ton online and never really see anything happen.

"Well, it goes like this. You post something, no one cares. You cry about it. You post something, no one cares. You cry about it. Then you're like, I'm not doing this anymore. And then a month later, you're like, I'm going to give it another try."

Basically you beat your head against the wall for a couple of years and you figure out the secret to it.

"And if you're listening to this and taking notes, the secret is you got to provide value to whoever is listening. Nobody, here's a newsflash, no one cares about your business."

No one cares about your new truck. No one cares about your new tools. People care about what we care about. What can they do for me? Why am I listening to this? Why am I going to hire this person? What's in it for me?

When you take the selfishness of most content, and Tony's guilty of this too from time to time, and turn it around and make it selfless, then you attract people and you build a brand and you become the trusted person that people want to call.

He loves the strategy for home services business.

"Like if you're a painter, you do a video on here's five ways to paint your room so you don't need to hire me. Let me show you the tricks of the trade."

You build a lot of trust and you might help people do the work, but 90% of the time they're gonna watch it and they're gonna probably call you because they're gonna try a little bit of it, they're gonna get sick of it.

The 80-20 Rule for Content

Tony mentioned the 80-20 rule and I wanted him to expand on that.

It's weird. It's counterintuitive to what you would think. You got a company you're trying to survive. You're trying to make a living. You're trying to feed your family. You're trying to send your kids to college.

Your intuition is to post, hey, hire me today. Here's my thing. And you need to do some of that.

"I would say you want to follow the 80-20 rule. 80% of it should be giving back, showing what you can do for people. And then the other 20% is like, hey, by the way, I fix roofs, I fix air conditioners. Call me."

You know someone who needs some work? Give me a call. Drop me a number, drop me a line, DM me or whatever media you're using at the time to talk to them.

That's the way he would do it.

Why TikTok Gets 20,000 Views Per Day

I asked Tony about his favorite platform to post on.

"I'm really agnostic to the platforms."

A lot of times he'll be talking in public, in person, and in his industry they talk a lot about LinkedIn because it's more of the professional B2B commercial HVAC realm.

Inevitably someone will say, usually it's some old fart a little bit older than him, he's 55, and they'll say, you know, I'm never gonna be on LinkedIn. I think this is stupid.

"And I'm like, you know what? I can care less about LinkedIn, but that's where the attention is. That's what matters."

He's agnostic to the platform. He wants to go wherever the attention is to achieve the goal he's trying to achieve.

He's on all the platforms, all the major ones. LinkedIn, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, YouTube Shorts.

"I held out for TikTok for years because I'm like, I'm not a dancing teenager. That was my misconception because I wasn't on there. I didn't understand."

Today they post primarily commercial HVAC educational content and he gets like 20,000 views a day on TikTok.

"Which to me is just shocking. Like there's people on there actually watching this stuff. It's crazy."

On TikTok and most of the platforms, you could tag your location. So if you're a home services business, roofer, painter, et cetera, in Chicago, and you tag where you're at, it's gonna show it mostly to people who are in your area.

"It drives me crazy today because I see the power of it, but it's free advertising and community building like we've never had before. It's actually more powerful than a TV ad, way more powerful."

Document Don't Create: The Gary Vee Strategy

I asked Tony to dive more into content strategy. What should people actually post?

"We're totally ripping off Gary Vee during this podcast, but I'm gonna rip him off a little bit more. He has a thing called document don't create."

What am I doing today? This morning, there was some breaking news in the HVAC industry. So he said, okay, I'm gonna do a breaking news clip. HVAC breaking news of the day, here's what's going on. He gives credit to the news source.

He's just documenting what's happening. The same scenario with the person who walks up to the lady's house replacing the air conditioner. You're just documenting that.

You might even be in the truck and saying, hey, here's what we're going to do. We're going to go to this thing.

"When you do it that way, it's super easy. And if you're in the field, it's an Eden of content. Your content's everywhere."

Clogged drain line, how to mix your paint, how to do this, how to do that. You could just make content left and right.

That's what he would recommend is just document your day, document what you're doing and focus on bringing value.

Start With TikTok, Post Once a Day Minimum

I asked Tony what's realistic to get started. Should you just be posting once a week?

"I would say if you could do it every day, that's great. I would say once a day and just focus on TikTok in the beginning because that's where I think your main opportunity is, the low hanging fruit opportunity."

If you could do once a day, do that. And before you do that, get in there and if you're not on TikTok, first of all, get in there and consume about 40 hours of content.

Go through, type in whatever business you're in, plumbing, and watch what the plumbers are doing. Watch, hey, this guy got 10,000 views, this guy got 500,000, what are they doing here?

How did they do it? How did they film it? Did they just record it, what they call B-roll, and then do a voiceover later?

"That would be one of my favorite things to do if you're in the field, because you don't have to set up and mic up and get in front of the camera, do all that. You could just take B-roll and then talk about what you did on that specific job."

All that to say once a day minimum. If you could do it, do it two, three times a day. But that's a tall order when you're first starting out.

Why His Pajama Video Got 1.5 Million Views

I asked Tony if he has a key to viral content, a short that gets over a million views.

It's tough. He's only had a few, maybe 10, go over a million in the five years. And he does a lot of content.

"The thing is you don't have to have those. You can have those and it could change your business."

The key is to bring value. The ones that go viral, they touch on some sort of emotional or intellectual truth.

You see it, you go, yes, or I agree with that, or that is so true, that is so true. But it's usually something like an insider thing.

He posted something about Phil Collins, I've been waiting for this all my life. And the caption was when your wife casually asks you how an air conditioner works.

"Every air conditioner guy's like, she asked me, here it goes."

Everybody could get that in the space and that got three and a half million.

Does that grow my business? "Well, it does a lot because it brands you as someone with a personality, it attracts people to your following, they're gonna rewatch your stuff."

The most viewed video he has on LinkedIn, it's about 1.5 million.

"It was me and I'd just woken up, I had like a sweater pajama thing on, I had a hat on, like a snow hat on. I looked like crap."

He was in his back porch and there was fog coming out of the dryer vent. They talk a lot about psychometrics in their industry, which has to do with humidity and air and dew point. The fog was a great teaching tool.

So he went out there and did it. "It looked so bad that I was like, I'm not gonna post this. I can't post this on LinkedIn."

Finally, he just did it and it turned out to be the best video.

"So the point is, you don't need to make it. It doesn't need to look great. It's all about is it a value? Is the content interesting?"

Another example is they've done 300 podcasts now. The best performing podcast they've had by far is him at his desk talking into his phone about heat pump technology.

"I didn't have a guest. It was just me talking into my phone."

That's the best one they've ever had. He's got the nice mic, the nice expensive camera, the whole setup, but that was the best performing one.

"So the lesson there is it's all about the content. It has to look decent. If you get better at it, you'll be like, okay, I can improve the lighting here and there, but don't ever let that stop you from posting content."

You could post that one little thing out on a job site or in your living room. And that's the one that could go off.

People Follow People, Not Logos: The Holy Grail

I asked Tony about the difference between building a personal brand versus a company brand.

"My recommendation is people follow people, not logos."

ABC Painting Company. No one cares about ABC Painting Company. But if you're Joe the painter, and you're on there and you're talking and you have a personality and you're showing people, people will follow you.

People will want to know what you're doing.

If you take that to an extreme, you look at a personality like Elon Musk. Not a lot of people are going to Tesla's social media pages looking at all their content. I can't wait for Tesla to post again.

But people will listen to Elon, whether you like him or not, you're gonna probably stop and listen to the guy.

"That's the difference between a company brand and a personal brand."

If he would be all in on building your company through you as the personality of the company. "That's the holy grail of content."

HVAC TV is a good example. You could see the logo behind him. That's the company brand that they own, but Tony's the personality of it.

"So the Holy Grail is to have someone like Tony out there and driving traffic to the HVAC TV, helping to build a reputation of that brand."

How to Actually Get Local Customers

I asked Tony how we can make sure that we show up in front of our local market.

Hashtags are good, but "Tagging the location in the app is huge."

Most of the content they do is in the US. It's continental. It's wide around the United States, not really isolated to any little pocket, because they don't have a brick and mortar store. They're not local home services in a specific area.

So they don't usually tag a location. But last October, they had a flood come. He's in Asheville, North Carolina. They had this biblical flood come through the area.

His wife and he are both content creators. So they went into CNN news reporting mode. Hey, we're here. If you need help, here's where to go.

They were blessed because their home wasn't affected. So they could go down to the river, help people, come back up, create the content.

They were posting tons of local content, which they'd never done before.

"And we would go out in public like, hey, thanks for what you're doing. People would recognize us at the grocery store, which was really super cool to be honest with you."

People would recognize them at where they take their trash. They don't have trash pick up because they're up in the mountains. They'd go to the dump and people would recognize them.

"Getting recognized at the dump. That's when you're famous up here in Marshall, North Carolina."

The auto parts store. Walking around with his daughter and someone would recognize them. She's like, my gosh, she was kind of embarrassed by it.

"So what I'm trying to say is if you show it locally and you tag it, hashtag it and you tell it what city you're in, it's gonna show it to those people who are around you. Huge."

He would put his phone number and email right in the description of the platform. His has his email there. Or they could DM you on the platform.

"If you create content enough, you will have people starting to reach out to you for sure."

Or what'll happen is you'll build the brand there and they'll see a billboard. "That's the guy from TikTok. I'm gonna call him. So it all kind of works together."

Tony's Message: Technology Doesn't Care About Your Opinions

I asked Tony for his message to the trades industry specifically regarding branding.

"If you want to grow your business or your reputation or your personal brand, the attention today is on the social media platforms."

And technology doesn't care what our opinions are of TikTok, of LinkedIn, of YouTube. You could have any opinion you want, but that's where the attention is today.

"And it's not going to be there forever and it's easy to get in front of and tomorrow it'll be somewhere different."

And if you don't want to grow, then don't get on there and do it. If you're happy with the way your business is, that's great. There's nothing wrong with that. Be perfectly content.

Being a solo guy and you got enough work, that's great.

"But if you do want to grow, that's a great way to grow."

My Main Takeaway

This conversation with Tony completely changed how I think about personal branding and content creation. The biggest insight is nobody cares about your business. No one cares about your new truck, your new tools. People care about what's in it for me. The secret is providing value.

The 80-20 rule is critical. 80% should be giving back, showing what you can do for people. Then 20% is hey, by the way, I fix roofs, I fix air conditioners. Call me.

And the pajama video story is incredible. Tony's worst-looking video got 1.5 million views on LinkedIn. He just woke up, sweater pajama thing on, snow hat on, looked like crap. But it was valuable content about psychometrics and the fog from the dryer vent. The lesson: it's all about the content, not how good it looks.

But what resonated most was people follow people, not logos. ABC Painting Company, nobody cares. But Joe the painter with a personality? People will follow you. The holy grail is having someone like Tony out there driving traffic to HVAC TV, building the brand's reputation through his personality.

Thanks for reading, and if you found this valuable, make sure to check out the full podcast episode. Tony drops even more content strategies and TikTok tactics that I couldn't fit into this recap.

You can find Tony at Tony Mormino on all platforms (M-O-R-M-I-N-O). He's most active on LinkedIn. Check out HVAC TV on YouTube for commercial HVAC content and the sciences of HVAC.