YES, BRAND with Hersh Rephun

Welcome to the show where brands take center stage for your edification and entertainment. Known as “The MESSAGE Therapist™,” your host Hersh Rephun is a veteran advertising creative, publicist, and comedian.

YES, BRAND with Hersh Rephun is a business podcast hosted by Hersh Rephun, with 84 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80.

Hersh Rephun hosts YES, BRAND with Hersh Rephun, a business show with 84 episodes published.

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  Episode #184

  Saahil Mehta: You Changed. Did Anybody Notice?

  Oct 1, 202647 minS10

  At 36, Saahil Mehta had done what he was supposed to do. The education. The career. The money. The business. The family. The lifestyle. No debt. He'd checked the boxes his 20-year-old self believed would make him successful. There was just one problem. He wasn't particularly happy. On YES, BRAND , Hersh Rephun talks with entrepreneur, author, speaker and leadership coach Saahil Mehta about what happens when you successfully build a life around a definition of success that was never really yours. For Saahil, the realization came after a retreat with fellow entrepreneurs built around two words: “no judgment.” For four days, he says he didn't have to pretend. On the flight home, he found himself crying as he tried to reconcile the man he'd just experienced with the one he was returning home to be. Pasted text So Saahil started removing what he calls the “clutter” from his backpack: expectations, behaviors and obligations he'd been carrying without asking whether they still belonged there. He became lighter. He changed quickly. And eventually his wife told him: “I don't recognize you anymore.” Pasted text That's where the conversation takes a very YES, BRAND turn. Because changing isn't necessarily enough. The people around you have built their own understanding of who you are. If you evolve without bringing them along, they may continue responding to a version of you that no longer exists. Saahil discovered this in his marriage. Hersh sees it constantly with founders, leaders and brands. People need evidence of the journey. Saahil and Hersh talk about inherited definitions of success, people pleasing, relationships, communication, personal evolution and the danger of assuming other people understand what's happening simply because it's perfectly clear to you. They also get into Saahil's life as a mountaineer and one spectacularly bad decision involving a 20,000-foot mountain, a requested helicopter and five terrified families. Today, Saahil describes success differently. Rather than climbing one mountain at the expense of everything else, he thinks in terms of his “inner seven summits” , including health, wealth and relationships, and asks what a yes in one part of his life will cost the others. Pasted text Because success isn't simply something you achieve. You have to decide what it means before achieving it can mean very much at all. Saahil has also created a Success Audit specifically for YES, BRAND listeners, along with an offer to personally work through the results with the first five people who respond: podcast.saahilmehta.com/brand FREE GIFT & OFFER link: https://podcast.saahilmehta.com/brand -- Hersh's new book, SELLING THE TRUTH: A ‘Semoir’ with Insights for Life & Business is a semi memoir drawing on his adventures as an Authority Advisor and Standup Comedian. It is part business book, part happiness formula for life, and an amuseful read, whether you’re building a business or burnishing your self-image. You can kickstart your own messaging evolution with a one-on-one 5-Minute Fix . Take the 60-second Get Off Your Assets Quiz, and find other resources here: https://www.hershrephun.com/selling-the-truth/

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  Episode #183

  Ms. K. Derhem: Building The Sovereign Kingdom

  Sep 29, 202622 minS10

  A note from Hersh: In interviewing so many fascinating entrepreneurs, many of whom are launching new ventures, we are selecting a handful of businesses to follow as they make their mark. The Sovereign Kingdom, founded by Ms. K. Derhem, is the first of these. Four more episodes with TSK will follow, featuring their partners and team as the story unfolds! So, let's begin at the beginning. The idea for The Sovereign Kingdom started with a locked door in Lima. K. Derhem had booked a stay through an alternative travel platform. Her host had warned her to be cautious traveling from the airport and to keep her luggage out of sight. K. followed the instructions, arrived at the property, rang the doorbell... And nobody answered. For hours. Standing there without access to the place she'd booked, K. found herself thinking: There has to be a better way. Pasted text That experience eventually became The Sovereign Kingdom, or TSK, an ambitious luxury ecosystem built around three founding principles: vision, grace and integrity. Pasted text On YES, BRAND , Hersh Rephun sits down with K. to explore what she's actually building and why she believes the opportunity extends well beyond luxury travel. They talk about a decision that runs against the instincts of many entrepreneurs: knowing when not to scale. K. believed TSK could have moved faster. But serving a clientele at the level she envisioned, with an offering she describes as averaging around $20,000 per night, required a degree of operational consistency she wasn't yet satisfied they could deliver. So rather than build a different version of the business simply because it could grow sooner, she waited. Pasted text They also explore privacy as luxury, how trust is earned when serving people who value discretion, and K.'s decision to build something that can ultimately become larger than her own personal brand. As she tells Hersh: “TSK is bigger than me.” Pasted text And then there's the name. For K., sovereignty isn't simply language that sounds luxurious. It represents the individual's ownership of their life, while the “kingdom” begins with the home as a place of safety, restoration and family. Those ideas come together in the company's larger ambition. Pasted text Property is the anchor. Service is the product. Sovereignty is the brand. This first conversation is an introduction to K., the thinking behind TSK, and the standards the company has set for itself. Now comes the interesting part: Watching what happens as they try to live up to them. Four more conversations to come. More: https://www.owntsk.com/ -- Hersh's new book, SELLING THE TRUTH: A ‘Semoir’ with Insights for Life & Business is a semi memoir drawing on his adventures as an Authority Advisor and Standup Comedian. It is part business book, part happiness formula for life, and an amuseful read, whether you’re building a business or burnishing your self-image. You can kickstart your own messaging evolution with a one-on-one 5-Minute Fix . Take the 60-second Get Off Your Assets Quiz, and find other resources here: https://www.hershrephun.com/selling-the-truth/

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  Episode #182

  Tim Klitch: How Do You Build a Brand People Want to Belong To?

  Sep 24, 202633 minS10

  After 35 years in financial services, Tim Klitch could have retired. Instead, he became Chief Fun Officer of a pickleball ranch. On YES, BRAND , Hersh Rephun sits down with the founder of Austin Pickle Ranch to talk about second acts, community, and what happens when everything you learned about succeeding in one career doesn't necessarily prepare you for the next. Tim knew relationships. He knew finance. He knew how businesses worked. What he didn't know was how to build a modern consumer brand. Banking had taught him traditional advertising and customer acquisition. Austin Pickle Ranch taught him about social media, influencers, experience and the strange alchemy that happens when a good product and a good brand start reinforcing each other. In 2025, Tim says Austin Pickle Ranch spent roughly $15,000 on advertising while attracting an average of 60 new customers a day. But the Ranch isn't really selling court time. Tim grew up around his father's tennis club and remembered something that many modern sports facilities had lost: people didn't just show up, play and leave. They hung around. So Austin Pickle Ranch was intentionally designed around community. Even its first location, an inhospitable parking-garage rooftop, was transformed with turf, shade, furniture and commissioned art to feel less like a garage and more like a ranch in Central Texas. And before that first location even opened, Tim and his team had already created a brand book and decided what they wanted the place to stand for: Accessibility. Friendliness. Informality. Fun. Those weren't words for a wall. They became a filter for decisions: Is this consistent with the brand we created? Hersh and Tim talk about building community by design, why experience is made up of dozens of tiny decisions, what has to remain true as a business expands, and the unexpected humility of becoming a beginner again after an enormously successful first career. Because Tim went from running a bank with an operations department to being the guy whose phone rings at 2:30 in the morning when the fire alarm goes off. And he wouldn't trade it. He could charge more. Build something more exclusive. Perhaps even make more money. But then it wouldn't be the thing he wanted to build. Sometimes the strongest brand isn't the one engineered to extract the greatest possible value. It's the one the founder actually wants to live inside. https://austinpickleranch.com/ -- Hersh's new book, SELLING THE TRUTH: A ‘Semoir’ with Insights for Life & Business is a semi memoir drawing on his adventures as an Authority Advisor and Standup Comedian. It is part business book, part happiness formula for life, and an amuseful read, whether you’re building a business or burnishing your self-image. You can kickstart your own messaging evolution with a one-on-one 5-Minute Fix . Take the 60-second Get Off Your Assets Quiz, and find other resources here: https://www.hershrephun.com/selling-the-truth/

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  Episode #181

  Cody Lee: What If People Don’t Understand What You’ve Built?

  Sep 14, 202629 minS10

  Cody Lee has a problem plenty of founders would love to have. People want what he's built. They just don't always understand what it is at first. On YES, BRAND , Hersh Rephun sits down with Cody, co-founder and CEO of Food Truck Club , a marketplace connecting companies with vetted food trucks for corporate catering and events. The company has facilitated thousands of bookings, with Cody saying roughly 80% of them now come from corporate clients. But say “Food Truck Club” to someone who has never encountered the company and they may picture something very different. Maybe Cody owns a food truck. Maybe it's a gathering of food trucks. Maybe it's something you join. That's what Hersh calls the “explanation tax” : the work a founder has to do over and over because the audience doesn't yet have the right mental box for what they've built. Cody knows the underlying demand is real. His first crude Wix site generated a $7,000 catering job and a $17,000 catering job on its first day. His approach ever since has been decidedly unromantic: sell the thing before spending all your time building the thing. But as Food Truck Club expands into new markets, another challenge becomes even more important. Trust. Corporate customers need to trust that the trucks will show up and deliver. Food truck owners need to trust the marketplace bringing them business. And neither side automatically cares what Food Truck Club accomplished somewhere else. That trust has to be earned again in every new market. Hersh and Cody talk about why unfamiliar ideas require patience, why growth can amplify problems just as easily as success, why showing your flaws can actually build trust, and the difference between explaining something people haven't encountered before and trying to convince them to want something they don't. Because sometimes the market isn't rejecting your idea. It just hasn't figured out what it is yet. https://app.foodtruckclub.com/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/codyclee/ -- Hersh's new book, SELLING THE TRUTH: A ‘Semoir’ with Insights for Life & Business is a semi memoir drawing on his adventures as an Authority Advisor and Standup Comedian. It is part business book, part happiness formula for life, and an amuseful read, whether you’re building a business or burnishing your self-image. You can kickstart your own messaging evolution with a one-on-one 5-Minute Fix . Take the 60-second Get Off Your Assets Quiz, and find other resources here: https://www.hershrephun.com/selling-the-truth/

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  Episode #180

  James I. Bond: Why Some Ideas Stick and Others Disappear

  Sep 10, 202647 minS10

  You can have the better product, the smarter argument, even the better idea. And still be the one nobody remembers. On YES, BRAND , Hersh Rephun sits down with behavioral management specialist and Brain Glue author James I. Bond to explore one of branding's most important questions: Why do certain ideas stick in our heads while others vanish almost immediately? James has spent decades studying the psychology behind what makes language, names and ideas memorable. His fascination began after he lost a pitch for an anti-drug campaign. James had built the logical argument. The winning campaign showed an egg. “This is your brain. This is your brain on drugs.” James immediately understood that the other campaign had done something his hadn't: it made people feel the idea. That loss sent him down a decades-long rabbit hole into emotional selling and what he eventually identified as 14 “brain triggers.” Hersh and James tear through examples from advertising and popular culture: Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus. Squatty Potty. Pop-Tarts. Gorilla Glue. The Hathaway Man. I Love Lucy. Even James's own name becomes evidence for the argument. Some are funny. Some are strange. Some sound almost too simple to have produced the results they did. But that's part of the point. A memorable brand doesn't merely describe something accurately. It gives the brain something to grab onto. Hersh brings the conversation back to something central to YES, BRAND: the bridge between the thing you're trying to communicate and the person you're trying to reach. Naming isn't magic, and it isn't entirely science. You're trying to understand what the audience will relate to, respond to and remember. Because clarity isn't terribly useful if nobody remembers it five minutes later. At its heart, this episode asks: What makes an idea impossible to forget? Websites: http://BrainGluePressKit.com/ https://usm-llc.com/ http://onlinesuccesshelpdesk.com/ https://cf.fasterbuyer.com/spd -- Hersh's new book, SELLING THE TRUTH: A ‘Semoir’ with Insights for Life & Business is a semi memoir drawing on his adventures as an Authority Advisor and Standup Comedian. It is part business book, part happiness formula for life, and an amuseful read, whether you’re building a business or burnishing your self-image. You can kickstart your own messaging evolution with a one-on-one 5-Minute Fix . Take the 60-second Get Off Your Assets Quiz, and find other resources here: https://www.hershrephun.com/selling-the-truth/

  ListenShow Notes

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