A Conversation with Paul Brunson: Life of a Celebrity Matchmaker
Paul Brunson
Paul is a serial entrepreneur and columnist for USA Today.
Paul Brunson talks to Russ Turner Director at Business Digest Magazine about the things he learnt from
working with diverse billionaires Oprah Winfrey and Enver Yücel. Paul also speaks about the struggles faced being
a black entrepreneur in business and about his business ventures, working with charities and
building schools in the Caribbean for under privileged children,
A Conversation with Paul Brunson: Life of a Celebrity Matchmaker
Paul you’re well known in the UK from the TV shows, Celebs Go Dating and Married At First Sight, as the hunky heartthrob that plays Cupid to those seeking love. But what I really want to know is, what was life like before the fame and what led you to where you are now?
That’s a good question. And I appreciate you said before the fame. I honestly don’t feel like I’m famous, or a celebrity or anything along those lines. I was an investment banker, that was my first job out of college. And then I went on to work for a very wealthy gentleman by the name of Enver Yücel , who’s a billionaire based in Turkey. He owns one of the largest educational companies in the world and I managed mergers and acquisitions for him outside of Turkey. I then launched a matchmaking company and started doing videos on YouTube called Modern Day Matchmaker, a YouTube series that I’m sure no one ever watched because we would get like 11 views and I knew my mother was watching at least nine times. But it turns out that Oprah Winfrey was one of the folks who watched this YouTube series, and she put me on television.
By putting on me on television, there’s this whole halo effect, where if one person is extraordinary in one thing, anyone who associates with them is considered to be extraordinary too. This helped me to launch two careers: my television career, that was 10 years ago and then also my matchmaking career. My wife and I went on to create one of the largest matchmaking companies in the United States. And then for the last 10 years, I’ve had a television deal, literally, every year whether it’s in the United States or the UK. So, that’s my life. It’s been a blessing after another.
I know, you support black communities in the Caribbean with your non-profit organization, Give Love Build Hope. Can you tell us about how that started and what is the main objective, what is the goal there?
Yeah, absolutely. I appreciate you asking me that. So, when I mentioned Enver Yücel, who I
worked for in the educational area. He ran K12 through 12 schools, as well as for profit universities and he also ran Test Prep companies. Because of my work with him, I interacted with a lot of governments and municipalities that were building schools, whether they be for profit schools or charity schools. And to be quite honest with you, I realized how easy it is to build and create a school and also, what the need was in a lot of communities around the world.
We just finished a project, about two weeks ago, and we’re going to put the video out, probably in the next two weeks or so. My goal for us, in this current year, is to finish a sustainable school, which is a completely Green School and finish that by November.
Have you ever had any difficult times being a black man trying to break through in business and entrepreneurship?
You know what’s interesting about this question is that, I was interviewed about a week ago and we were talking about this phenomenon called, The Silicon Valley Tech Bros. Have you heard about this?
I know a lot of them, so yeah. I know the vibe.
Okay, the Silicon Valley Tech Bros are like for example, a Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter and Square. This whole notion of, you are typically a white male who creates a tech company and gets some type of financing for your tech company. And the reason why I was asked the question, it’s because the media loves Silicon Valley Tech Bros. I know this, I’m a writer for USA Today. And I know, when my editor tells me to cover something, I know exactly why the interest lies there.
Now, what’s interesting, is that the business schools (and I went to Georgetown) typically use Silicon Valley Tech bros for case studies.
So, you have top business schools, disproportionately focusing on the study of, let’s say an Airbnb, Twitter, Facebook, on how they run their businesses. You also have the media constantly trying to figure out these companies.
One of the biggest honours of my life was about three months ago. I was on the cover of Entrepreneur Magazine with a bunch of other people. And when you look at everyone who’s on the cover of Entrepreneur Magazine, it was disproportionately represented by Silicon Valley Tech Bros. We were on the cover for people who helped to innovate in 2020 as a result of the pandemic.
Why am I saying all this given the question that you asked, because when I was asked this question, I said, “If people, all people, no matter, your ethnicity, nationality, if you really want to understand how to start, grow and manage a company, you should focus on finding black business owners who are running businesses that do over a million dollars in sales. Because if you could find black businesses that are doing over a million pounds let’s say, in sales.
You’re going to find truly exceptional leaders, and you’re going to find people who have had to fight every form of adversity there is on the planet, and still succeed, versus a lot of these Silicon Valley Tech bros, that when you really decipher and you break down the nuances of their connections, their family connections play a key role.
You begin to realize that yet they’re still sharp entrepreneurs, but they started on second or third base. They had advantages.” So, to answer that question, there’s an enormous amount of adversity for anyone black to break through in business. And I say, disproportionately study black businesses because everyone can learn lessons from black businesses.
You worked with two billionaires in your life, Oprah Winfrey and Enver Yücel. What did you learn from them and what can you pass on to our audience?
I learned an incredible amount from them. I worked with them collectively for about eight years. Oprah, for three and Enver, for five. I first worked for Oprah Winfrey and she was such an incredible person and it was such a unique opportunity. I started journaling at that time, and I would write down just different ideas and different things that happened during the day. And when I went on to work for Enver, I noticed that there were similarities between their habits but yet they were completely different people.
Oprah
was American and Enver was Turkish. Oprah was a woman and Enver a man. Oprah was a Christian and Enver a Muslim. They were completely different in characteristics, but they had the same habits, the same strategies. That led me to looking at the uniqueness of their strategies.
There are lots of different commonalities that I saw but some of the big ones, for example, was this whole notion of never eating alone. Keith Ferrazzi, wrote the book, Never Eat Alone, a New York Times bestseller, great book. But what he didn’t disclose or what he didn’t say in the book is what I learned from Oprah and Enver is that they would never eat alone. Whenever we had dinner, there would be 20, 30, 40 people at different tables around us. And they methodically invited people to the dinner.
Who did they invite? They invited people that had different opinions, who could debate out topics. And the reason why Oprah and Enver did this is because they realized, that when you read a newspaper, you’re reading what happened yesterday. But when you put people in a room, who are debating about various topics, who they themselves are newsmakers, you are learning the news of tomorrow. And that’s how they stay ahead of the curve, is that they invite an eclectic group of people together. And this is something that we can all do.
Oprah and Denver would invite mayors, and heads of states, and CEOs of businesses in, but we could do this ourselves. So, for example, this is before the pandemic, but every first Sunday of the month, right here in my home in Washington, DC, I would invite 8 to 10 people in and I would have brunch with them in my home, break bread. We would sit at the table, we would talk about various topics, debate them out, I was gleaning the news of tomorrow. So, never eat alone was one of the biggest lessons that I learned from Enver and Oprah. Many more but that was one of the biggest.
As well as being voted the world’s most influential matchmaker by the Matchmaking Institute, a business columnist for USA Today, as you rightly said, you’re also a LinkedIn Top Voice selectee.
You’ve got quite a few big outlets to express yourself. How important do you think it is to have a voice online nowadays and what do you use yours for?
Yeah, great question and absolutely, yes. Without question, it’s important for us to have a platform. I think what’s interesting is that we all have a voice; we all have an opinion. But the question is, do we have the platform to amplify our voice and to amplify our opinion? Now, what oftentimes we get confused with, especially with Instagram, is this notion of, if I have lots of people who follow me, therefore, I have lots of amplification. But that’s a myth. That’s a misnomer. It’s not. For example, I don’t want to shade some of my folks who come on, say, Celebs Go Dating. But when you look at someone who has a following of say, a million people on Instagram, you want to dig down to find out who are the million people that follow them.
It’s much different than if, and you know, I want to be careful with this but, if we’re talking about business context, we’re talking about creating impact, we’re talking about creating product services, we’re talking about creating wealth. It’s very important that you have people who are influential within your audience because people who are influential can then amplify your voice. For example, if I said I had one follower on Instagram or one follower in LinkedIn, a lot of people would say, “Oh, I’m sorry Paul that’s disappointing.
I’m sad for you.” But if I said that the follower was Oprah Winfrey, and she reshares everything that I post. Well, then I have more power than the average person that has a million followers or 10 million followers. So, it’s very important to have an audience for amplification but what I want to underscore is, it’s more important that you curate the right audience, that you curate an audience of influencers.
And I have a theory that suggests that, thought leadership is more important than anything today. And how you achieve thought leadership today is based on who you place in your audience.
So, in every industry, there’s four constituents, you have consumers. Secondly, you have subject matter experts. Third, you have influencers. And fourth, you have thought leaders. What differentiates the thought leader from everyone else in an industry, is who follows them. The influencers go to the thought leaders to get the ideas to influence their community. So, to your question it’s absolutely important to have a voice more than ever.
And then the second piece there is: what do I use my voice for! I use my voice to teach. I think that’s what I’m recognized for, is I teach across every platform, whether it’s Celebs Go Dating, or Married At First Sight, or whether it’s on LinkedIn, or on USA Today, or my community Better With Paul . BWP Connect, which literally, I just finished, a masterclass with a group of full-time business owners.
Everything that I do, the commonality is I teach, I’m trying to help people become better. In particular, my avatar is an entrepreneur, my avatar is an entrepreneur, who values ambition, values, financial freedom and values culture. That’s the commonality among my avatar. So, I use my voice to help make that person better.
Going back to what you said at the beginning there, about the followers and people having a million followers. I sort of went down the same route many years ago, about trying to get as many followers as I could and quickly learned that it was a complete waste of time. And then from that point, I started to build my networks with really successful people, journalists from Washington Post.
Just to piggyback on something you said, I think it’s really important: is you talked about how you methodically went after say, for example, a reporter for The Washington Post. That’s that old school hustle relationship building that we need to bring back. We need to understand it’s not just about someone hitting follower, hitting like, it’s about building an actual relationship. And that takes time, that takes energy. Do you know what I mean? So, I love that you were methodical about doing that because you get more yield. Your ideas go out to more people, you have more impact by doing I think it’s very important.
I’m a whole karma believer as well. So, obviously I try and think: what can I offer them, what can I give them? If it’s business, I’ll give them a free Ad placement in our magazine if I have to build that relationship. And that has worked time and time again, to be fair, I still do that to this day.
You know, it’s the same thing, I completely agree. I think what you’re doing is, you’re building relationships the appropriate way.
Before we go Paul, I know obviously, you are a busy guy but before you go, I wanted to tell you something Paul, that I’m actually jealous of you. That’s right, I’m jealous of Paul Branson. I’m not jealous of you because of your perfect skin, your success, money or infectious personality, none of that. I’m jealous of you because of the amount of good you can do in the world. And by sharing your story, I get to help you in a small way.
Nothing like a major network but we are doing our best to grow, and promote and we’re going to be here for a long time, helping people like yourself that are doing good for others.
There you go. And one is, I thank you. And then also, I’ll compliment you off the back of that and tell you why I’m here. So, I think Tiana might even have mentioned this, that this is an odd time for me, particularly this exact week. Why? Because Celebs Go Dating is getting ready to come out on the 25th and there’s another major project that I’m working on so, I’m constantly getting hit with different media outlets.
So literally, yes, the last two days, I’ve been on Good Morning America , which is the biggest morning television program in the United States, 5 to 10 million people watch this thing. And every day, I’m getting inundated with different media outlets to talk to and I can’t talk to all of them.
So, I have to use my discernment on who to talk to. And I’m picking, the categories that I’m selecting or I’m selecting people who I believe I genuinely would like to have relationships with, just like you mentioned the Washington Post reporter. And when I saw the link for your magazine, I was like, Okay, this is an upstart, I mean, no s…, you guys are getting it going but I like what you’re doing. I like who you’re going after, I like the idea what you’re doing. I like the idea of this, a black issue.
I like the idea of this. So, I said to myself, yeah, these are folks that I would like to have a relationship with. So, kudos to what you were doing because I think it’s important. I think you’re filling a void. I think you have a unique voice in what you’re doing and I’m supportive. I’m a supporter of what you’re doing.
Thank you. I’m honoured to be fair, that’s really nice feedback to hear. And it must be really difficult for you, obviously, being at a certain level and then, as you said, with Good Morning America and then you’re looking at all these other opportunities. And I find it really hard as well to sort of say to people, that I can’t have you or I’m too busy.
That concludes are interview so on behalf of the Business Digest Team, I’d like to wish you the best in life, continued success, health and matchmaking longevity
