A CEO’s Guide to Building a No-BS Personal Brand (& Reviving a Dying Business)

What It Covers

Jonathan Goodman explains how PTDC went from near-bankruptcy with 30 staff to multi-million dollar profit by firing everyone, abandoning complex funnels, and refocusing on his personal brand through organic content creation.

Key Questions Answered

• •Hiring mismatch: Goodman hired expensive VPs from large corporations at $150-200k salaries who excelled at their previous roles but lacked the entrepreneurial mindset needed for a small, aggressive company requiring bottom-line focus and nimble execution without middle-management structures.
• •Data paralysis trap: The team accumulated excessive customer research, reports, and slides that paralyzed decision-making. Three copywriters wrote in Goodman's voice while he developed curriculum backstage, despite being an 11-book author who should have been the public face driving customer acquisition.
• •Wayback machine strategy: When sales pages stopped converting, Goodman used archive tools to find their best-performing historical launch page from years prior, republished it unchanged, and immediately restored conversion rates. Sometimes the solution already exists in your past successes.
• •Personal brand economics: Goodman eliminated all marketing staff, stopped paid advertising for three years, and grew Instagram from 20,000 to 200,000 followers through repurposed written content. One personal brand now feeds books, certification, mentorship, and 30,000-user software platform with zero marketing team.