On today's episode, I want you to be inspired by the personal brand story of George B. Thomas.
I first encountered George when he was on stage hosting the Inbound conference by HubSpot. George has such a great energy, and he brings so much value to many people in so many different ways, not just as a HubSpot expert, but also in the way he talks to people and cares about people's lives.
Today we are going to talk about how he first grew his personal brand by aligning himself with other companies and what that led to. We're going to talk about his adventures within agencies and how they helped him to continue to evolve his brand. Then we will talk about the next phase of his career as he launches his own agency and how all that work became the unknown foundation that allowed him to launch quickly.
Finally, we talk about his newest initiative that goes beyond his agency work and speaks to the core of what he's always been about, which is, corralling untapped human potential and encouraging others to go for it the way others have encouraged him along his journey.
Tune in as we talk about:
[00:00] Welcome George B. Thomas!
[04:34] How did George start his personal brand?
[07:51] Personal Brand Lesson: Be very careful that you don't let what you think are weaknesses stop you, because many times what you think is a weakness can be your strength.
[09:14] What was George doing (before video, podcasting or any internet content) that captured the attention of Marcus Sheridan?
[11:03] Personal Brand Lesson: If you’re sitting in an organization you can become a leader. You can be a thought leader. Even if you're not the owner, even if you don't work for the organization that you're teaching the things around, that's the power of building a personal brand inside of the organization.
[15:31] When it comes to building a personal brand remember that different people engage with different types of humans. So its not a competition with others - you are just reaching the people you were meant reach and others are reaching the ones they are meant to reach.
[19:42] How George decided to start his own agency and how the work he had done on his personal brand helped him launch quickly.
[24:07] How does George decide what opportunities he is going to align himself to? |[29:18] What is next for George?
Contact George B. Thomas:
Website: Georgebthomas.com
Podcast: HubHeros
Podcast: Beyond Your Default
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Christine Gritmon: Hello, welcome to Let's Talk About Brand. I am your host, Christine Gritmon, and I'm coming at you every single week on Let's Talk About Brand, interviewing another guest expert about another topic related to personal branding. Today, we get to hear the incredible personal brand story of George B. Thomas.
I first encountered George when he was on stage hosting at the enormous, Inbound conference run by HubSpot. I've seen him on stages numerous times. I've been on his podcast. He has several podcasts. He has several video series. He's done a whole bunch of stuff with his personal brand, but when it comes down to it, what really lingers with people and what they really notice.
This is George himself. He just has such a great energy, and he brings so much value to so many people in so many different ways, not just as a HubSpot expert, but also just the way he is and the way he talks to people and the way he cares about people's lives. So we're going to hear from George today about, first of all, how he became George B.
Thomas in terms of, becoming that name that companies recognized the value in. We're going to talk about his adventures going, within agencies, starting to take more steps. He's in the final stages, starting to do more content, and eventually starting his own agency, plus another new initiative that goes beyond his agency work to really do the core of what he's always been about, which is, corralling that untapped human potential and encouraging others to go for it the way others have encouraged him along his journey.
All right, so as many others have said before on many other stages, come on down George B. Thomas!
George B. Thomas: All right, I'm on the price is right. Let's go.
Christine Gritmon: The price is always right on Let's Talk About Brand.
George B. Thomas: I know. I can't wait. I'm so excited, Christine, today to just unpack and add value and help the viewers or listeners of this content that we're about to put down.
Christine Gritmon: And I'm so excited because I have had the benefit since Probably about 2016 or 2017 of seeing you share your gifts on stages, on podcasts. I have been on your Marketing Smarts podcast and it's honestly one of my favorite podcast appearances I've ever done. You're a really good host. And can I just say the thing that I noticed most about you as a host, which I think is probably an indicator of how you operate as a person and as a creator and as a brand, is that you really listened.
To me. And I know, obviously, when I'm talking with people and interviewing them, I do listen. Obviously. It's a conversation. But you really were so on it where you'd take like a tiny, specific grain of something that I said and you just spin it out. And I really appreciate that about you and what it says about you as a generous creator.
George B. Thomas: Yeah, it's funny, Christine, because when you say that, I'm like yes, it is how I operate for me. It is all about the humans and all about being human. And when I say that, I have to say it's about being a good human along the way and good humans listen to those who they're interacting with.
Good humans make those people that they're interacting with feel comfortable. And so when I bring somebody on the marketing smarts show or the sidekick strategy show or any podcast that I'm creating with somebody it's like, how do I make them comfortable? How do I listen intently? How do I create a dope conversation?
That all the listeners can just feel like maybe we're at a bar or a library and they're just listening in and they're getting like these secret gold nuggets of information to use for their business.
Christine Gritmon: Oh, I love that. Thank you so much. So I want to give the folks at home just an overview of who you are, what you're all about. And let's actually start pretty early, George, because we're going to tell your story here today on Let's Talk About Brand, because you have built a brand while within another organization.
You built a brand as an employee. You have built a brand in, conjunction with another brand, and you've built a brand just as you, as George B. Thomas. You've done all sorts of things, many of them concurrently. So let's go to the start, not like literally birth, but whatever avenue in which you started building your personal brand, if we can even say that.
I know it sounds like a weird thing to say about yourself here's where my personal brand started. But still, George, when did your brand start?
George B. Thomas: Yeah, darn it. I was going to say I was born in 1970. No, I'm just kidding. So what's funny is I can actually pinpoint to the time. When the brand was born per se. And here's the thing, a couple of things that I want people to understand is that a lot of what has happened has somewhat been strategy.
Somewhat just been circumstance and somewhat just happy accident, but they can learn from what has happened along the way. So in 2012, I was working for a small agency in Massillon, Ohio, and our social media guy came running in and he's Hey you've got to check out this webinar by this company called HubSpot.
They're doing the world's largest webinar. And the owner and I were like a what by who we had no clue that there was this thing called inbound marketing or this software called HubSpot, but we sat down and we listened to this webinar. And during the world's largest webinar in 2012, they were saying, Hey, we're going to give away 10 tickets to the top 5 percent of tweeters.
This was back before Twitter changed their name. Anyway, the 5 percent of tweeters on the webinar, long story short, we won two tickets. By the way, I didn't tweet once the owner didn't tweet once our social media guy, his fingers are on fire. Ah,
Christine Gritmon: I have to point out that's actually part of how I started building my personal brand. I started, participating in those conversations, tweeting at conferences like Inbound, and that is how I got seen at the beginning. So I love that part of your story begins with getting seen as participating in, in an event.
George B. Thomas: Yeah, absolutely. So we went to Boston. We learned about HubSpot. I fell in love. I went from a designer developer, a guy who pizza and a six pack comes in the office and a website comes out the other side to saying, I want to be a marketer when I grow up. One certification became two, became six, became seven.
And then all of a sudden, I got the phone call. And this is the birth of the brand. I got a phone call from a gentleman named Marcus Sheridan, who I worked for before he wrote the book, They Ask, You Answer, but is the author of They Ask, You Answer, and a couple other books at the time of this recording.
And he says, Hey, I think you have some talents that I can use. And my small agency back then, it was called the sales line. And so I got hired there and immediately we started creating a podcast called the hub cast, which was a podcast specific for hub spot users. And he, in 2014 made the words of. I want you to start doing video.
And so I started doing HubSpot video tutorials. Now this is way before video became cool because it was like in 2018 that they started saying, this is the year of video. Now they've said this is the year of video ever year since then, but in
Christine Gritmon: is not the year of video. I think this is the year of audio.
George B. Thomas: Yeah, I'm right. Exactly. So podcasting and video tutorials, and that is where all of a sudden we went from this crazy thing of like inbound zero, I would call myself to this journey of becoming an inbound hero. And the fun part about this too, and I think something that the viewers and listeners can learn from when Marcus said, Hey, we're going to start a podcast.
I said, Marcus, you're crazy. I hate my voice. Now I have to fast forward to the first inbound conference we went to after we started the hubcast. And all of a sudden people in the halls were like George B. Thomas, which. How do people know my name? And then we would have conversations and they would like, dude, I'd love your podcast.
I love your voice. And I'm like, wait, I hate my voice. They're like no, dude, you sound like a radio DJ. And here's something that's interesting. When we're thinking about building a brand, we've got to be very careful that we don't let what we think are weaknesses are stop us because many times what we think our weaknesses can totally be our strength.
And so my voice and my presence and who I am being on audio and being on video and being consistent is what has taken this guy who was an inbound zero, just trying to figure it out, wanted to be a marketer when he grew up to where we are today. But we'll talk about that in the future.
Christine Gritmon: I wanted to go back to something you said, which is Marcus Sheridan reached out to you and said, Hey, I think I have a use for your talents, but you skip past the part where those talents were on display. So tell me. What did Marcus see in you, and how did he come to see it? In what way were you putting yourself out there in your early days so that you could be plucked from relevant, from, relative obscurity?
What were you putting out there back then in those early days, before the podcast, before the videos?
George B. Thomas: Yeah, what's funny is I wasn't putting anything out on the Internet, but what I was doing was being me. And let me explain that. So as I was going through this educational journey with HubSpot Academy, because I did want to be that marketer when I grew up, right? And I was getting the certifications, I would hop on these webinars.
And I would engage in the chat pane and I would answer the questions, but then I'd also be stupid. I'd be like M& Ms or, Skittles or, fruit of the looms or Hanes or like I would just be like funny, but engaging in these webinar chat panes and people would just start joking around and just make it fun.
And all of a sudden, the people who are running HubSpot Academy, the people who knew these webinars, they're like, hey, this guy's kind of cool. Then the only other layer of this is every time I got a certification from HubSpot Academy, I put it on LinkedIn and I said, Hey, another one down on a mission to catch them all.
And so there was this internal conversation at HubSpot, which Marcus talked to the folks at HubSpot. And there was this exterior explaining of my journey, my educational journey and who I was building myself into being. And out of those two things, That's how I got the phone call.
Christine Gritmon: Sharing your journey is absolutely huge. That is everything. So I love that worked for you. All right. So you're working with Marcus Sheridan, SalesLion. You have your podcast going, you've got your videos going you went to your first inbound marketing conference after that, and okay, so let's take it from there.
So what happened next in your brand building journey from there?
George B. Thomas: Yep. So in 2012, when I was at that event, I saw Gary Vaynerchuk speak and Christine, I said, I want to do that. And what I meant is I wanted to stand on stage and I wanted to entertain people and I wanted to educate people. And when I started working for Marcus and we started doing the podcast and we started doing the tutorials and the video.
The next thing was, how do we get me on more stages? And that really was the next elevation of the brand is how do we get on stages and educate? And the next thing I ended up having my first keynote, I went and keynoted an event called a min bound, which is Minnesota's inbound version. That was in like 2015. In 2015, I also got selected to do a breakout session at inbound.
So now I was speaking at the event that just several years ago was the catalyst for where I was headed. And I've been able to speak there every year since either digitally or in person, if it was an in person event, I have been there. And so it's just this idea of being able to be on stages. Now there did come a point in time where this switched a little bit.
We went from the sales lion to being about a team of four or five humans. We got acquired by a brand called impact brand and design. They're an awesome company, but I went from being pretty much independent person who created content and helped educate humans about HubSpot because Marcus was teaching content marketing.
And I was teaching the HubSpot side of that content marketing for our clients. And so we got acquired. It was a team of about 45, almost 50 people. And I was like, ah, this does not compute. I do not belong here. What happened? All of a sudden I have a manager. And so I freaked out mentally and I bailed.
And I ended up going to work for another company, which is Impulse Creative. And when I got there immediately, by the way, Remington Begg and Rachel Begg, they're amazing humans. I got there and what did I start doing? I started podcasting. I started creating content. So I started a YouTube channel called sprocket talk, and we went from zero subscribers to over 7, 000 subscribers just on HubSpot tutorials.
So again, what was I doing? I was taking this brand that I was, had built, and I started to rebuild the brand under the George B. Thomas, but then Sprocket Talk name, Impulse Creative name, instead of the sales line name. And it got to the point where there was another crazy phenomenon happening. And that is when I would talk to people, they would say you guys have a really cool software.
And I would be like, what do you mean you guys? And they're like you work for HubSpot, don't you? And I was like, no, I don't work for HubSpot. Here's the other crazy phenomenon is a lot of people either thought I worked for HubSpot or they thought I owned Impulse Creative, which I did neither. I was just a guy who created content consistently for people in the HubSpot ecosystem.
And all of a sudden they started having their own perceptions and placing me in where they thought I belonged. And it wasn't even reality, but it was perception. So it was their reality. And so what I'm the reason I'm bringing this up is because I want everybody that's sitting in an organization that might be watching or listening.
This realized like, Hey, you can become a leader. You can be a person of a thought leadership or of power. Even if you're not the owner, or even if you don't work for the organization that you're teaching the things around, like that's the power of building a personal brand inside of these organizations.
Christine Gritmon: I love that, and it clearly worked out really well for you. You became known as the HubSpot guy. I want to roll back, because I know that you've maintained good relationships with these people and with these organizations. I want to know how Marcus Sheridan and how Impact and how, all these places reacted to it because I would imagine, what you said almost, almost sounds like what organizations kind of fear when putting people forward, which is that your name was out there more than the organizations and they didn't even connect it to the organization necessarily.
However, I have a feeling that's not really, how it went necessarily. I think that you probably brought value to those organizations with the strength of your personal brand. So can you talk a little bit about how Your personal brand actually helped those organizations as well, because it certainly, certaInly did.
George B. Thomas: So mindset especially at the Sales Lion, and even at Impulse Creative, the mindset was we can have personal brands inside the organization, because the only thing that does is it powers up the brand even more, right? There's only so many people that Marcus Sheridan could touch. And there's only so many people on this planet that Marcus Sheridan was made for.
Okay. And I want everybody to understand it made for meaning the tribe that he'll be able to collect. There's another set of humans that were made for me, meaning they like the way I talk, the way I do my tutorials, the way I act as a big freaking goofball on podcast. They'll be able to be my tribe.
And so now all of a sudden, what you can do is you can start to create these single community, but there's almost like these micro communities inside of that. By the way, we're not inventing anything new. If you think about. Let's say a mega church and you'll have multiple pastors. Why do you think that is?
It's because different people engage with different types of humans and they'll find their place. And so at the sales line and impulse creative, it wasn't a competition of the George B. Thomas brand can't get bigger than, or sprocket talk can't get bigger than whatever it is. It was a how do we create the most buzz, the most movement and we really at that time we weren't in a because it wasn't as much of a buzzword as it is now.
We weren't in a let's build a community mindset, but just naturally. What we are doing with who we are, we were building a community. The other mindset that I have to unpack is that Marcus, and he would say this publicly many times is that when you are willing to hire stallions, you realize that sometimes they have to run.
And while for a timeframe, you might have them in your organization. If you're truly a great leader, you get more excited. When they head out to their next adventure, instead of getting hurt by the fact that you have been the incubator to grow them into who they can become. I have this scenario right now, by the way, in my own organization, because punch line, by the way, I've started my own company.
We'll talk about that a little bit more, but I've been growing. All the people that are in my organization in the understanding that they may go off and do their own thing. For instance, I hired both of my sons to do podcast editing and video editing, but am helping them figure out how to start their own podcast editing and video editing business.
I hired Jorge who is my HubSpot implementation specialist. And one of the things that I said after we got him on boarded is, dude, I want you to start doing HubSpot tutorials and putting them out on our YouTube channel and putting them out on LinkedIn. Why? Cause I want him to build his brand. for his people, for his tribe that will collect around him so that we can empower the George B. Thomas brand as a whole. And will he eventually ride off into the sunset? Maybe. Will I be sad? No, I'll be happy as hell because I know that he came into our ecosystem. I was able to grow these people and help them become the best versions of themselves. Now, that unfortunately is not the leadership that is in most organizations.
And if I could impact anything on this planet, I would get more leaders to think that way. Now, just because they don't think that way, though, doesn't mean that you shouldn't think in the way that helps you become the best you possible. And that is always going to be by creating a personal brand around who you are, your values, your missions, and the things that you love.
Christine Gritmon: Wow, boy, are you singing my song. I love this. Okay, so I want to make sure we get up to present day. So here we are. You are being acknowledged as the HubSpot guy. You don't work for HubSpot, but you are known as the HubSpot guy. So where do we progress from there? You've got your tutorials up, your sprocket talk, is that it?
So where do we go from there?
George B. Thomas: Yep. So I decide not to work at any agency. That's where we went from here. So I got to the point where I was like. And by the way, first of all, and I got to say this because I think it's a narrative that a lot of people run in their brain. I had told myself I'm a great number two to a number one. I'm a great Robin to a Batman.
I was not allowing myself to have first player energy, but it got to the point where one morning I woke up Christine and. As, as audible as it could sound without me being crazy. I heard if you don't do this, you're going to regret it when you're 70 very specific number, by the way, I don't know why 70, but if you don't do this, you're going to regret it when you're 70.
And so, I decided to start my own jam. And at that point, I wasn't even going to start an agency. I'm just, Hey, I'm just going to go out on my own. I'm going to do some HubSpot consulting. And so I gave Remington Bagot Impulse Creative a 60 day notice, and I worked every one of those 60 days because I was trying to give him time to replace who I was and what I did in the organization, because I was a vital part of the attract and probably convert phases of what they were doing from gaining new clients because of all the education and content we had put out there. But now it's been about a year and eight months, year and seven months. I've been doing my own thing. We went quickly from just it being me, a solopreneur to doing a Hubspot consulting to now we're literally like a HubSpot agency.
We've got, seven employees, four contractors, more clients than I ever thought we would have. And it's just been like. Somebody basically buckled me into a rocket ship and hit the button, but it doesn't, it didn't make sense to me at first. Like why would the business be having the success that it was having as quick as it would have?
Because one would think, Hey, you're going to start your business. You got to eke out an existence. You might be profitable by year three, who knows, but the somebody that I was talking to one of my first clients and they actually called me and they said, Hey how much does it cost to be your client?
Because I know here in the very near future, you're not going to be able to take any new clients. And I, first of all, I said, thanks. You're crazy. He goes no. I don't think that you understand what you've been doing. He goes for 10 years now, you've been pulling back a slingshot, pulling back a slingshot hub cast podcast, sprocket talk video tutorials, he goes, the day that you put out on social that you are starting your own business you let go of the slingshot.
He goes, so I hope you're ready. And he knew what he was talking about because it has been that kind of going out of the slingshot, fast forward just craziness in all the good ways that it could be to the point where I understand super blessed. It feels like we're cheating, but we're not cheating.
We're here's the thing that everybody's understand building a personal brand, adding value to the world, being consistent with content, it's not cheating. It's a great marketing plan. And again, along the whole way, not by purpose, but a lot by just oops, did I do that? Like the Steve Urkel thing.
We were building this crazy marketing plan for the day that we decided just to go do our own thing. And so you're right. Like I get emails that will say Hey, you've got to work with this guy. He's the goat. Now, Christine, I would never call myself the goat of anything, but that's the perception.
Therefore, that's their reality. That's where they've placed me based on something that most people would call extraordinary. Now, here's what I want to say. I don't necessarily think that I've done anything extraordinary, meaning each day it was about a video tutorial or each week it was about a podcast episode.
That's not extraordinary. However. When you do that consistently for 10 years. Now that's extraordinary.
Christine Gritmon: It certainly is. And the great thing is you are doing your own thing. You are running your own agency, but you are. You are still working with adjacent companies. You do stuff with HubSpot. You do stuff with Marketing Profs. So I want to talk to you a little bit about that stuff and how that fits into your whole personal brand ecosystem because you don't have to be lending your personal brand to other entities, but you are because there's alignment there.
So can you talk a little bit about those things that you're doing and how you decide which opportunities like that to do?
George B. Thomas: Yeah. So a lot of it, and again, because it's all about the humans and being human, a lot of my decisions are truly made with gut. Sometimes I try to stay out of my mind because my mind can be a little bit crazy, like many of our minds. But I do choose to work with different brands. So for instance, marketing profs was a client before I had my own company, meaning when I worked at impulse creative, one of the things that marketing profs paid us to do was just for me to show up and emcee their webinars. Okay. So I had been doing that for about a year through impulse creative. And then when I decided to make the jump of being my own boss marketing profs was actually looking for somebody to host their podcast.
And and Hanley. Came to me and said, I'd really like you to be the host of the podcast. First of all, I love Ann Handley. She's freaking amazing. She's a great human. She helps other humans be better humans with everything that she does. So I
Christine Gritmon: She also has a strong no assholes policy. That's something that I really respect about Ann Handley as well. She will only work with good people, so if you're in her ecosystem, not only have you gotten the good person stamp, but you know you'll be working with other good people and supporting good things.
George B. Thomas: that's it. And we aligned so much in that because my policy is no douchebags allowed. Like the only rule that we have no douchebags allowed. So what's fun. Is marketing process became really one of my first clients when we went out to do our own thing and it had nothing to do with truly what we were known for, which was HubSpot, but it was this podcast and it was the webinars and emceeing.
And so literally every week I'm doing a MC project for them. Every week we're putting on a podcast for them. And I love it. And. The reason I love it is because I love learning. So I get to interview smart people like yourself. I like educating others. So we get to create this podcast and put it out to the world.
And it's just an amplification of the brand. Now, here's the funny thing. I noticed some similarities. I had been doing HubSpot tutorials. Hey, you guys have a great software, meaning they thought that I worked for. HubSpot. When I started doing the B2B stuff, so Marketing Smarts podcast and the emceeing a year later, I was featured in an article of one of the top 12 B2B marketers to pay attention to.
I've never once said that I was a B2B marketer, a B2C, a B2G, a B2 anything. I'm actually just a guy who focuses on the humans and how we can make businesses that those humans work at better, but because of being on a B2B a podcast now also on my brand started to get associated with business to business, which I am not complaining.
I don't care. It's literally like another chink in the belt of the brand. So what does that allow me to do? Well, It allows me to walk into B2B spaces. It allows me to walk into inbound spaces. It allows me to just go into these places, be who I am, and allow the people, the tribe, the community, to dictate their reality, how I fit in it.
And that's a wonderful place to actually be able to sit in and understand that people are going to accept you for who you are, just be you be unique, be human, be mindful, be like, there's a whole framework right that we're working on that we want to talk about when we talk about it's all about the humans and me being human, like there's some elements in there that we want people to understand this is what we mean. So eventually we're going to talk about that more and it's going to be on one of the two podcasts, maybe both podcasts that we're doing now inside the organization. We might make some videos about it. Listen, if you're listening, I'm not creating any new strategy.
I'm just telling you what historically we've done and what in the future we're going to continue to do to allow people to get to know who we are.
Christine Gritmon: Now, one thing I find really interesting about this whole story is that, as you've said, you are a human, you're not a marketer, you're not a B2B marketer, you are a human who's about the humans. That is the value that you bring to the table. However, you have done this with a very specific vehicle, and I don't mean your content types like podcasting, I mean HubSpot.
So you have built your brand. within the vehicle of another brand. And you've tried different things. You're not afraid to move around. You're not afraid to break free of constraints. This is something that, this is a pathway and guardrails that you've chosen and that you continue to choose.
So I'd love to hear a little bit about what's behind That. Because you could easily have said, you know what, since people are responding to the human hero for humans part, I'm gonna go be a coach. I'm gonna be a business coach. I'm gonna go do, this other thing. I'm gonna go make my own software.
But you've chosen not to do that. You've chosen to stay within. I'm going to help bring HubSpot to more people. So I'd love to hear a bit about what's behind that, how that has worked. Any objections to that I hear?
George B. Thomas: No.
yes,
Christine Gritmon: you've chosen to do that.
George B. Thomas: yeah, I'm going to yes. And you're there and you'll see what I mean here in a minute. So here's the thing inside of HubSpot, because HubSpot was a tool, it allows me to be me. Now I'm a recovering youth pastor. I think that's why for me, it's all about the human and about being human.
And in all of my videos or most of my videos got to be careful of absolutes. I would end with this tagline of don't forget to be a happy, helpful, humble human. And there are things in my life that I've learned along the way that are Pointing to make sure that you're focused on happiness and joy and living the best life that you can make sure you're focused on being a humble human, not a narcissist or egotistical because if you get, you know, ego is kind of the enemy helpful, meaning add value to the world.
And what's fun is it was a vehicle for me to have that narrative to show up. And the reason that I was showing up that way is because the fundamental principle of what I was trying to do is get more people to show up that way. Because here's the thing in 2012, when I went to that conference, HubSpot was saying, don't call me customer, call me human. And I was like, now that right there is something I can get behind. And so I feel like I've diligently been being that human element of don't call me customer, call me human of the HubSpot ecosystem the entire time, like doing my part to keep them on the narrow path of being this type of community of being a value based, we're not competitors.
We can all help each other. Let's just make this the best ecosystem possible. And I've just been doing my part in that. Now, here's what I'll tell you is the reason I chose to stay there is because it was working. And the thing that you're diagnosing too is one thing that another buddy of mine said one to me one time and it blew my mind.
But I think if you're building a personal brand, you have to leverage this. He said, dude, you are a transition specialist to which I said, what the heck does that even mean? He goes, I watched you go from being a designer developer. To somebody who is going to learn marketing and learn HubSpot, he goes, then I saw you go from that to doing podcasting and from that to doing video.
But the whole time you're doing podcast and video, you were doing marketing and you're doing HubSpot, but you are transitioning into these things. Now it's like transition into AI because AI is a hot topic, right? So you're adding all these elements you're pivoting and you're transitioning into these things in these hot pockets, in these hot moments.
And you're just like creating the superhero tool belt of things that you can do. Listen, if you're going to build a personal brand, you have to have curiosity, right? I already talked about consistency, but curiosity. And the ability to learn things and implement things along the way. And it's because you might be teaching something, but you have to learn this thing to teach it.
You have to learn this thing to be able to do it. And so that's idea of pivoting or transitioning and curiosity and understanding that it's going to be a windy road. Now, where I want to get to, and I'll pause before we actually go deep into this, I, when I started the business I did start a podcast, it's called a hub heroes podcast.
We named the company George B. Thomas LLC, which we're probably going to name because it needs to be an agency name, next year, sometime we'll probably come out with that. But along the way, I realized one thing, Christine, for the last 10 years, I've been helping humans with HubSpot
Christine Gritmon: Okay.
George B. Thomas: and everything that I've taught happy, helpful, humble human.
And the way that I teach people to do marketing and sales now, because by the way, it's gone past marketing. It's marketing sales service. I've had 41 HubSpot certifications, been a HubSpot accredited trainer did onboarding for HubSpot themselves for two years when I was an impulse creative, but everything that I would teach, I would realize it was predicated on the fact that they were good humans.
And not everybody comes with their business hat on and understands how to be a good human. Or some people even have lived a life that have forced them not to be or understand what being a good human and showing up as a good human is. And so because of the launch of the business because of the mindsets that changed in me from a, I'm a great number two to a now I have to have first player energy.
We've also started something new. And again, I'm not gonna create a brand new strategy. I'm just going to rinse and repeat what we've historically done. But you mentioned go be a coach or be, by the way, I feel like I am a business coach. It just happens to be wrapped up in HubSpot, marketing, sales, service, that type of thing.
But we're literally getting ready to launch a thing called Beyond Your Default. Which is now, instead of just helping humans with HubSpot, it's just going to be about just helping humans.
Christine Gritmon: I love that. Which is what you've been about this whole time. And it explains your story too. You've tapped your potential. Just in increasing ways over the years. And here we are. I love it.
George B. Thomas: Here we are.
Christine Gritmon: George, this has been absolutely amazing. I would encourage anyone to look at all the stuff George has done whether you're interested in HubSpot or inbound marketing or not.
Regardless, George will inspire you. So George, tell people at home, where can they find you? Why should they find you? And what will they find there?
George B. Thomas: Yeah, so first of all, what you'll find there is just somebody who fundamentally cares about your future success, whether it be as a person or as a business, somebody who's ready to have a conversation, ready to listen and give you advice, whether that's working with us or not working with us. I just know, That is my job to sow the seeds, to be a blessing and whatever happens will happen.
That's just how I roll now, where you can find me. If you're looking for like marketing sales service help you have HubSpot or you're thinking about getting HubSpot, then just head over to georgebthomas. com. That's the website for right now that everything lives at. If you just love podcasts and listening to podcasts, you can listen to the hub heroes podcast, because that's our kind of HubSpot business marketing sales service specific podcasts.
Now, if you're listening to this and you're like, I just need like a mega dose of what just happened on this episode. Almost every day of my life, then I would suggest you go to beyond your default dot com. There's podcast episodes there. There's a free newsletter there. And there is a community that we're building out there that are these folks who are either, in a fork in the road of their life, or they feel stuck and they feel like they're destined to go somewhere, or maybe you were just pouring a freaking high achiever. Maybe if you're one of those three types of people, then beyond your default in the content that you're going to find there and becoming a better human um, having somebody to traverse the a hill of success or the lane of significance that you might be chasing. That's where I would send them.
Christine Gritmon: Ah, I love it. And I can personally vouch for this, people. George actually will talk to you and wants you to succeed. That's not a gotcha there. Like he will do it. So reach out. Thank you so much, George. This has been amazing.
George B. Thomas: Thanks, Christine.
Christine Gritmon: And thank you so much for listening, whether you are listening to Let's Talk About Brand the podcast on your podcast player of choice, or if you're here for the video podcast on YouTube. Either way, please do subscribe.
If you liked it, please do leave a comment or a review, and please do join us next week when I'll be back here with another guest expert talking about another element of personal branding.
Bye!