 Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you so much for joining me on this Thursday afternoon. It is the last day to enroll for Brand Plan Academy. And as I promised you earlier this week, I wanted to take you behind the scenes and show you a little bit about this program. When I created this program, oh gosh, I started creating it about a year ago. It was really my vision to take the abstract concept of personal branding and put it into something that's tangible so that people can actually almost touch and feel their brand. And I believe that I've done that here with Brand Plan Academy. We had our first round of students go through the program in the summer and receive some excellent feedback and obviously some tips on how to improve the program which has now been done for this group of students here in November and December. But I'll tell you more about the program. Let's take a look at the program and how it can help you create and amplify your personal brand so that you can start attracting leads and opportunities in your role in the hospitality industry. So let me just share my screen. I've got a bit of a walkthrough of the program and let's take a look at Brand Plan Academy together. So really what Brand Plan Academy does is it takes the personal branding and five-dimension framework that I created just a little over a year ago. And these are really the five dimensions that I feel are critical decisions when we're creating our personal brand. So the first decision is defining the actual goals of your brand followed by designing your brand. And that's where we do a deep dive into the person that you are and the unique qualities that you bring to your audience. In the third dimension, we're determining the platforms. These are the places that we're going to show up. And of course we're gonna talk a lot about all of those different places inside Brand Plan Academy. And four is where we develop our content. These are the things that we're amplifying through our brand in order to create trust with our audience and move them down the path to purchase quicker towards our products and services. And of course, number five, the final dimension is we're discovering our community which is really what our brands are all about. So let's take a look at how we tackle these five dimensions throughout the course of Brand Plan Academy. But before we even start with the five dimensions, we need to get a little bit of work done in the first module. The first module is all about getting ready. And there's really two things that I feel we need to prepare in order for us to head into those five dimensions that I mentioned. The first is developing a healthy branding mindset. One of the things that always trips us up when we start to amplify our brand are those limiting beliefs that hold us back from really showcasing our true potential and our true unique value proposition. So in lesson one of Brand Plan Academy, we're talking about those limiting beliefs and we're even creating a bit of a strategy to help us combat those limiting beliefs. We're also defining any triggers that might, I guess, put us off when it comes to those beliefs. And we all have different triggers. It could be social media related. It could be industry related. And so we're going to actually name it and identify the triggers that occur in our lives when we're experiencing those limiting beliefs. But again, the biggest reason we want to do this groundwork is to create an action plan. And these are activities that you can lean on when those limiting beliefs pop up. Because we want to make sure that those limiting beliefs are recognized but also dealt with as we head into planning our personal brand. So we do all of this in lesson one of the first module. Now lesson as well inside of the module is the introduction to the Brand Plan Academy brand book. This is a chapter book that you, of course, get to fill out and keep throughout your branding journey. And we're introduced to the first chapter here in module one where I've included some worksheets and checklists that will help you develop a personal branding mindset. So once we've done that work, then we're going to have the second most important conversation of this entire course and that is talking to our employers. Now, many of us don't have an employer to talk to. Many of us are entrepreneurs or solopreneurs and perhaps you don't have to have this conversation. I still encourage you to take a look at this module though because there's a lot of questions that maybe you even want to ask of yourself or questions that you would consider your client to ask of themselves if they were to step out and create a personal brand. And of course in this, we're talking about any hurdles that might pop up for you or giving you some scripts and templates on how you can explain to your employer the importance of creating a personal brand. So we do this in this module as well as finding different alignments between your two brands. Now, one thing I mentioned on the webinars that I hosted this past week is finding the alignments in the values and belief systems of both your personal brand and your company's brand can be a really powerful conversation. So we talk about how we can weave those alignments right into the dialogue we have with our employer when we're setting out to do our brand. And as I mentioned as well, there's a number of activities you can do internally at your organization to grow your brand. So it doesn't have to all be about finding the end clients and finding the end prospects but even looking at increasing your opportunity to be a thought leader internally at your organization. And we're gonna give you some examples of how you can do that and of course how you better your organization with your brand. We also have a number of resources again inside the Brand Plan Academy brand book that walks you through those conversations. So that wraps up module one. And now module two is when we start to head into those five dimensions that I mentioned earlier with the first being defining your personal branding goals. That's the very first thing we're going to do because it is going to set the groundwork for the remainder of your branding journey through BPA. There's a number of things that we're going to look at in setting our goals, including two different goal frameworks. One you may be familiar with which is the smart goal framework but there's another one that perhaps you haven't had opportunity to experience yet. And it's extremely powerful when we're looking at setting our personal branding goals. So Farley's really excited about that exercise. If you hear him barking, it's because he thinks this is the cat's meow. Thank you Farley for helping us with our Brand Plan Academy journeys. We're also going to reverse engineer our goals so that the tactical action steps we are taking each and every day is going to help us achieve those larger goals that we set. So we talk a lot about that. And then of course some examples of goals that you may want to consider setting through your personal branding journey. Also in this module, we're going to talk about how the goals impact and influence our target audience. Then you may have done exercises like this before in the past, which is fantastic. I believe you have now a very strong framework as we head into lesson two. But we're going to dive a little bit deeper and we're going to talk about the importance of niching our personal brand to make maximum impact with our target audience. We're also going to look at those audience insights. Now, if you were on the webinars the past couple of weeks, you were able to download a worksheet that led you through a journey in discovering more about your target audience. We're doing it again with a few extra exercises thrown in and then of course finding different ways to research our clients to get those insights so that we are crystal clear on the person that we're trying to impact. Another very powerful strategy is something we call the one-on-one interviews. I don't feel it's done enough in our industry to gain feedback that will help us better our products and services. And so I walk you through a framework on how you can conduct these one-on-one interviews and gain those valuable insights that will help you in your brand moving forward. So that wraps up module two and now we're heading in to a very fun but very deep module. And that is module three, Designing Your Brand. Now, I do wanna say this about Brand Plan Academy. One thing we do not do yet in Side Brand Plan Academy is talk about logos, fonts, branding photography and all those different fun assets that you can have as part of your brand. Number one, I know many of you are working for a larger organization. Perhaps you don't even have the flexibility to create a font and logo style guide for your brand. But number two, your brand is much more about than colors and logos. It's about what you are amplifying and how you're impacting your audience. So Designing Your Brand here in module three is really about diving into the layers of your personality and identifying the strengths, the passions, the traits that you possess that you now want to showcase to your community. So we're doing that in eight different areas of your personality. It is a super-duper deep dive into who you are. I think you're going to love, love, love this exercise. It's a ton of fun. And the next exercise, which is a lot of fun is looking at your stories. And these are things that we've experienced all the way from childhood up until present day and how those stories can impact and influence our communities. There's always a lesson in some of the stories that we experience. And we want to pass those lessons on as a way of building trust with our community. We have a number of resources again inside of the chapter for this particular module where we can dialogue our stories and our labels so that we can refer to them often when we're telling our story through our brand actions. And then the last lesson in this module is finding that unique value proposition. And this lesson contains more than 24 questions that you can ask yourself that will dive into what your unique value proposition is. 24, it's a lot of questions. But what I'm really, really trying to find here is I'm really trying to uncover those little, little nuggets that make you or that set you apart from your competition. So it's an incredibly thorough exercise. I think you're really going to enjoy it. Then at the end of module three, we're creating some tangible assets. These are things that you can use. These are things that you can touch and read and experience including identifying your top brand words which will become kind of your guiding light for the rest of your branding journey, creating a personal branding statement which again is that guiding principle taking you forward through your journey but also creating some client facing assets including biographies, elevator pitches and social media headlines. So this is a very meaty module and these brand assets will help you create those interactions with your community moving forward. So I hope you enjoy module three but the fun isn't over then. We go ahead into module four where we determine the platforms. And this is where we're going to show up for our target audience. And if you're again, if you are on my webinars this week it isn't all about social media but we do talk a lot about social media. Social media is an incredible way to amplify our personal brands. But guess what? Personal branding existed long before social media. So we're going to talk about other branding platforms as well. With social media, we're going to go through the pros and cons of each individual platform. We're also going to talk about the platform's current I suppose popularity in the marketplace and the different demographics of people who use different platforms. And so if you dig up the information about your target audience, you can kind of figure out, okay, these are the different social media platforms that they're going to hang out in. And we're going to look at that one question that will drive all of your social media decisions. Very powerful one. I also have a comparison chart that compares each social media platform as far as ease, as far as who's hanging out there. So stick around for that inside of VPA. But like I said, we had personal brands long before we had social media. And there's other ways of amplifying our personal brand. Second way is through what I call the platforms that we own. And these are things that include, sorry, I'm just gonna hide this, let's see. Just having screen difficulties. Can you see that bar on the bottom? I don't know how to get rid of that. If there's any StreamYard experts out there, let me know how I can get rid of that. Anyways, so we're gonna talk about the three long form platforms, the most popular ones anyways. And spoiler alert, it's creating a blog or creating a podcast or creating a video series. We're gonna talk about the pros and cons in each. And then we're gonna go through seven questions that you can ask yourself before you start a long form platform. And then of course, questions to see if it's a good fit for your business and of course for your personality and the time you have in any given week or month to produce the content. But there's also a number of other platforms that we can use. And we talked about these on the webinar this week. And I call them the interactive platforms. This is the one-on-one engagement, something that our industry does really, really well. And so we're gonna talk about those five interactive platforms, the pros and cons to each of them, and of course some best practices and tips for using each one. All right, so now we've got our platforms determined. We're heading into module five, which is all about the third pillar of, or sorry, the fourth pillar of the five pillar personal branding, five dimension framework. And that is developing your content. These are the social media posts, the blog posts, the podcasts. What is the content that we're fitting into all of those things? Well, we kind of like liken the content into pillars and we go back to our personality characteristics in the stories and all of the things that we discovered about ourselves in module three and we find some common themes that lend themselves well for content. And we create our content pillars in the very first lesson of module five. We talk about why content pillars are such an important part of our brand. We also decide which content pillars would be the most effective in impacting our audience. And of course we look at everything else that we've done to date in determining what our content pillars are. Now what I love about this module is there is a ton of resources that are going to help us map out our content strategy. We've got the brand book again that we've talked about all the way through Brand Plan Academy, but we've also got a few spreadsheets that you can use to kind of play and manipulate with the information that you've learned about yourself to create those five pillars. Then in lesson two, we're talking about the five types of content. Now, the types of content are different from the pillars and here's how. The pillars are really about the theme and the lesson and the instruction and the direction that you're giving inside the piece of content. The type of content is kind of how you deliver the message. So is the message delivered in a very inspiring way? Is it delivered more in an educational way? Is it delivered more in an informational way? So we're looking at the five types of content. We're giving you some examples and we're creating a bit of a checklist for when you feel you have a piece of content that you want to share and we're gonna put it through a bit of a test to make sure that you can create it into something that's gonna make maximum impact. All right, then we're putting all of this good stuff into a plan or a calendar and that's what we're doing in lesson three is we're going into our content plan and strategy. And this lesson has a number of really great resources. Again, it has that six point content strategy, everything from the initial brain dump for that piece of content all the way through to how we repurpose that piece of content in the end so that we can save you some time and save you some energy in your branding journey. We talk a lot about repurposing in this module. I think it's important that we all capitalize on the incredibly important content that we're creating and we get the most out of those pieces of content. Now, I'm also gonna walk you through and give you a content calendar. It is a very robust document that allows you to move and shift pieces of content around. And I've created a bit of an abbreviated version that you can download now. So if you go over to liankholderwood.com forward slash calendar, you can download your own content calendar, take a look at it, see how it's kind of set up where you can organize the different pieces of content across all of your different platforms and of course, according to date and day of the week. So that's at liankholderwood.com forward slash calendar. All right, we're about to exit module five and we're heading into module six which is all about discovering your community. And I think it's one of the dimensions that we seem to forget about as we're on our personal branding journeys is that really our personal brand journey is about the other person and not so much about ourselves but it's about who we're trying to impact and influence. So we talk about those people inside of module six. First, we talk a lot about where we're going to find these people that we want to impact and we go through a ton of different tips and tricks and research tools in lesson one. And then in lesson two, now that we have found them, we're going to talk about different ways that we can nurture them. And we talk about four different kinds of community members and different ways of connecting and nurturing each member as they relate to us. So for example, one community member are what I call our fans and our advocates. These are people that have supported us throughout our journeys and we wanna make sure that we're also nurturing our advocates as well as maybe our new fans as well. All right, so once we come out of module six, we're heading into module seven, which is the brand plan action plan. This my friends, this is where the rubber hits the road and we start to put to work all of the incredible things that we've just done up to this point in our journey. So the first thing we're gonna talk about is how to choose our battles when it comes to all the branding things that we can and want to do with our now new personal brands. So we revisit our goals, we set our actions, we assess our time and then we schedule it in. And module seven has a number of tools to help us do that, including more calendars that you can look at, sample activities and some tracking tools for all of your branding goals. Here's a quick example of one of the tools that we use. This is a weekly calendar for when we can block out time to work on our personal brands. And then we can start to plunk in some different activities as they pertain to our personal branding goals and all of those things that we reverse engineered way back in module two to get us to goal achievement. We've also got a few different formats if the spreadsheet doesn't work for you, we've got a checklist type of format to make sure that you can get to your goals. And then in lesson two, we're talking about measuring those goals. And remember measurement when it comes to an abstract concept like personal branding can be a bit difficult, but I've tried to put again some concrete tools together so that you can actually see the progress in your branding journey. So we're gonna talk about six different ways that you can measure your progress and ways that we can measure progress as it pertains to maybe even one of the platforms that you chose back in module four. All of this is being contained and bound in your personalized brand book. Each of the modules has a chapter of the brand book that you can print out right in. Of course, you can reprint and change as necessary. And before you even start the course, there is a bit of a module that talks about the brand book and how you can keep your information organized so that when you need to review it, it's easy to find. Now, that is the Brand Planned Academy journey inside of the course and the seven modules that you'll experience. But there's also a couple of other things that you're going to experience if you decide to enroll in Brand Planned Academy. And that is, oh, I've already talked about the chapters. Oh, these are the chapters again. Sorry, so there's one chapter for each of the modules that I mentioned as well as chapter one, which is getting ready. And then of course that seven action plan. But we created two auxiliary assets for this course to kind of amplify your journey and give you a bit more to work with. And one is the Content Idea Super PAC, also known as 101 plus content ideas. This is an incredible pack of ideas that you can use to create content that you can now amplify through your personal brand. And then the second one is the Brand Planned Academy Facebook Group. This is a private group just for BPA students where we come together to share best practices, share our questions, look for sounding boards. It's an incredible place to hang out and get all of your personal branding questions asked and answered. And who doesn't love a highly engaged Facebook group? So I hope when you join Brand Planned Academy that you do take some time to join us inside of the Facebook group as well. We'd love to see you hang out in there. So that my friend concludes the BPA journey through the course. If you're interested in enrolling here in this fall session, you can start by going over to liankholderwood.com forward slash enroll. And there's two payment options there to gain access into BPA. We have a three monthly payment plan of 247 or you can get this all done once for the 627. And when you go to liankholderwood.com forward slash enroll, you're going to see a page that looks like this and it doesn't seem to be scrolling very well, is it? No, it's not. Oh, sorry, folks. Not sure what happened to my video there. Anyways, you're going to get to a homepage that gives you more information, things that I've been talking about throughout this LinkedIn live about the course itself. And of course, as you're scrolling through that information you're going to see the payment options pop up and you simply choose the one that might work best for you. And then it'll take you to an order form that should take you less than two minutes to fill out. Once you filled it out, you'll receive a confirmation page that looks like this with a bit of a video just welcoming you to BPA. And then in your email, you'll get all the details on how to set up the course in your course library. So check out the email that comes from me a few minutes from when you register and that'll give you the link that gets you to the course library homepage which looks like this. Once you set up your account, you're in your library and you'll see Brand Plan Academy right at the top of your library. And then when you get into the library there's yet another welcome video and I'd love for you to take a look at that. But more importantly, head on over to the videos that talk about how to get through the course. The information contained in these videos is gonna include a lot of tips and tricks on how to maximize your time inside of BPA, how to maximize the Brand Plan chapter book and of course how to access the Facebook group and all the other bonuses. So again, head on over to liankholderwood.com forward slash enroll to learn more. Now I'm happy to stay on this call and answer any questions that you have about BPA. I am going to exit out of this and just return to the Facebook, to the live feed. So if you have any questions, I certainly want to answer them here on the call. If you don't, please get a hold of me either through LinkedIn, you can send me a direct message or send me an email over at liankholderwood.com. Doors to Brand Plan Academy closes this evening at 9 p.m. Pacific, that is midnight Eastern Standard Time. I do hope to see you in the next student group and we can go on a Brand Plan Academy journey together. Thank you so much for joining me today for this orientation into BPA. And I do hope to see you in the classroom. Have a great evening everyone, bye for now.