BUILD YOURSELF, BUILD YOUR BRAND

By Daymond John
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On Shark Tank, I sit next to some of the most successful entrepreneurs and investors in the world. While we all know all of the aspects of creating a successful business, I’m definitely the brand guy. With FUBU, I built an entire empire based on branding and style, and that’s actually where I see a lot of promising ideas fail. People come on our show with a great idea, but they don’t have a sense of their brand. They’re absolutely sure that people will buy what they have to sell, but they can’t really say why.

​That’s why building your brand is so important, and to build your brand, you really need to build yourself. What do I mean by building yourself? Here’s just one example… In season six of Shark Tank, we had a repeat guest come to make a pitch to us. David Alwan of Echo Valley Meats crashed and burned the first time he was on Shark Tank because he just wasn’t prepared. He was asking for an unrealistic amount of money, and he couldn’t tell us why we should invest in his brand or what we could expect to see if we did.

​This time around, though, David had it all together. He had all of the numbers we needed, and he was asking for half the money he asked for last time. But that wasn’t all that impressed me. This time, David came in with confidence. I could tell right away that he’d been working on himself as much as he’d been working on his brand. He didn’t just know that he had all the information this time; he knew he had a great pitch that we were going to love.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Daymond John is a business and media mogul, and is featured on ABC's Shark Tank as "the people’s shark." Daymond began his entrepreneurial success by founding the famous clothing line, FUBU, in 1992.