BUILD YOUR PERSONAL BRAND!

If someone had told me 20 years ago to start branding myself and that the payoff would be exponentially greater than any branding I might do for my business, I’m not sure I would’ve bought in. However, 20 years later, not only do I get it completely, I’m all in and hoping I can articulate it well enough to all of you so that you, too, can benefit from building a personal brand.

Friends, we’re talking about this topic this early in the year for a reason. 2024 needs to be the year that you either begin building your personal brand, or ramp up what you’re doing to expand what you’ve already started. What we’ll talk about in this episode is the ‘why’ behind personal branding; why you should build a personal brand over a business brand; and what you can be doing to build your personal brand.

Let’s start first with the why of building a personal brand. You might already be sick of me talking about this topic since I’ve done a couple of episodes on it recently, and I’ve been mentioning it in almost every other episode since then. However, there is a reason for this and it’s rooted deeply in my belief about the future, as well as my experience building a couple handfuls of business brands.

The why of building a personal brand in 2024 and beyond is simple: the world doesn’t give a shit about your business brand, they care only about how they will be taken care of and whether or not their problems will be solved. They don’t care about your logo, your colors, your flags, your stickers, your branded pens and trinkets, your embroidered hats and shirts, or your letterhead. That’s not to say those things don’t matter at all, they just don’t speak to the people who will be paying for what you are selling.

Think of any brand that comes to mind and you will eventually be forced to name a person or people associated with that brand. Nike has Michael Jordan, Facebook has Mark Zuckerberg, Apple has Steve Jobs, Oprah has Oprah, Dave Ramsay is his own brand in the financial world, and so is Gary Vaynerchuk of Vayner Media. In fact, most people know Gary Vaynerchuk as Gary Vee, and have no clue he owns a billion dollar media services company. All of those companies are what they are today, of course, because of their products and services, but primarily because of the personal brands that give those companies a human component and allow people to connect with a person, only then do they connect with a brand.

What is even more interesting to note when it comes to personal brands is that the opportunities to build an extensive product and service ecosystem is much greater with a personal brand than it is with a company brand. Other examples of well known personal brands would be Tony Robbins, Richard Branson, Elon Musk, Tim Ferriss, Simon Sinek, Seth Godin, Martha Stewart, and Noah Kagan. If you don’t know any of these people, just look them up and start studying how they built their personal brands.

Let’s be clear, whether you know it or not, you already have a personal brand. We all do. The important questions to be asking are:

1. What is my brand?
2. What does it say about me?
3. Who knows me and how?
4. Has it been deliberate and intentional or by accident?

So, what Is a personal brand? At the most basic level, your personal brand is a promise that you make to your market, your audience, your customers, and your clients. It’s obviously how you are already known to those groups, but more importantly, it’s what they know they can count on you to deliver every single time. I’ve often said that the differences between marketing and branding is that marketing is any activity you do to create a lead or a sale, while branding is how you make people feel and what they remember about you. This episode is not about the differences between marketing and branding, but I bring it up because it seems to be one of the most misunderstood comparisons.

Often, when I start talking about your personal brand, people almost instantly go to marketing. They start asking questions about their logo, their colors, their brochures, their advertising budgets, and so on. All of those things are relevant, and almost anything you do from a marketing standpoint is contributing to your brand, but it’s not the same thing. What we’re talking about in this episode is your personal brand versus a company brand, and why it’s so important in 2024 and beyond to be building a personal brand.

First and foremost, a good personal brand gives you influence that money simply can’t buy. If done correctly; and by ‘correctly’ I mean with honesty, integrity, and lots of good will, your personal brand will help open doors that would likely be closed for you otherwise. A good personal brand can be measured by the three R’s:

1. Recognized
2. Remembered
3. Revered

Are you recognized in your area of specialty as one of the go-to authorities and not just by your mom and your employees? Being recognized in your market or your area of specialty means, when the topic comes up, your name is on the top of almost everyone’s mind.

The second ‘R’ is remembered. You might be recognized in your field as an expert, but how are you remembered by those you work with and those who would pay you for what you do? Being remembered means not just being recognized, but also top of mind when your area of expertise and specialty come up.

And the last ‘R’ is revered, which means people have a deep respect and admiration for you and what you do. In my opinion, this is one of the more important of the three ‘R’s. It’s one thing to be recognized and remembered, it’s a whole other thing to be deeply respected and admired by your constituents, clients, customers, and market. Reverence typically only comes from giving to people more than you’re taking or asking for.

So, what does it take to build a personal brand? Surprisingly, it’s not that difficult. What seems to be the most difficult is getting people to first understand the ‘why’ of building a personal brand, and then taking the necessary steps to start building one. By the way, I do see some of you out there making attempts to build a personal brand and I applaud you. The big challenge I see for most of those trying to build something is the lack of clarity around who you want to be, who you want to help, who you want to speak to, and how you want to be recognized, remembered, and revered.

That leads us to the first part of building a personal brand; deciding who you will serve. If you don’t know who you want to serving and solving problems for, you’ll make the mistake of believing the whole world is your audience. If you try to speak to everybody, you’ll end up speaking to nobody. You must first take some time to really think deeply about who you want to help and why. Once you figure that out, you can start to get really clear on what their struggles and challenges are, why they have those challenges, and how you can help them overcome those challenges with your solutions. Of course, you also need to have solutions to their challenges or there would be no real purpose for building a personal brand.

What you personal brand allows you to do, if built right, is to more clearly define your market, clearly define the problems and challenges of your market, more dynamically create solutions for those problems, and create an ecosystem of products and services around your brand. So many of you have been pouring in time, money, and effort into building your business brand, which is ok, but it can be very limiting.

If your business brand is Smith Appraisal Services and you have a really nice logo, some nice colors, cool letterhead and business cards, and you take out a 3X3 ad every month on the local diner’s placemats, maybe you get some business from that, maybe you don’t. Maybe people recognize you, maybe they don’t.

What would be much better is to pour your time, money, and effort into building up the brand that is Jim or Nancy Smith, instead of Smith Appraisal Services. Nancy Smith becomes known in her market as the one who gives all the office talks, she serves on a local board, she does a weekly podcast for her local market or writes a blog each week with pertinent market information, she shows up to industry and industry adjacent events to become better known, and she finds unique and creative ways to solve problems with the experience and skills she has. It just so happens that Nancy’s appraisal company, Smith Appraisal Services, starts to also get some traction because of Nancy’s efforts in creating a personal brand, but people know her as ‘Nancy the appraiser who is always helping people be better’.

Building a personal brand does not mean you have to become as well known and popular as Taylor Swift or Kanye. It simply means that you focus on building you as your brand, instead of your company as the brand.

I can tell you from experience building multiple company brands, as well as personal brands in a few different industries, that focusing on the personal brand paid far greater dividends than did focusing on the company brand.

Case in point, I’ve been building my business coaching company for almost 20 years now. The Real Value Coaching Academy came into existence back in 2005, but in the mechanical contracting industry. I had helped build a fairly sizable residential and commercial HVAC business and started teaching other contractors around the country how to sell better. I built a 3 day intensive on-site boot camp for residential HVAC contractors called the Comfort Sales Supercamp that took off like hotcakes and kept me busy for several years.

Teaching that course opened up a bunch of new doors for me that would likely never have been opened had I not started to become known in those circles. Several of the big manufacturers started reaching out to me for interviews and started to make offers to buy the boot camp and have me teach it exclusively for their contractors. I met with Trane, York, Carrier, and several other of the big HVAC brands about being an exclusive corporate evangelist and coach for their contractors. It was quite an exciting time!

What I started to realize, but hadn’t fully grasped what to do about it, was that they didn’t want the Real Value Coaching Academy, they wanted Blaine Feyen, the guy who created the coaching academy. They saw what I was teaching and how I was teaching it and they wanted to take me off the market for all of their competitors and have me working exclusively for them. I was extremely honored and really thought I had hit the big time.

Needless to say, I turned down all of those offers and continued to offer my course to anyone who wanted to learn and be better. I didn’t want to be exclusively tied to one company. One brand, one set of products. What I didn’t realize at the time was that I was making a decision about my personal brand. I wanted to have complete control over who I coached, how I coached, what I charged, how I ran the bootcamps, and how my name was recognized, remembered, and revered within that industry.

Fast forward to today and the Real Value Coaching Academy still exists, but now I put most of my effort into promoting Blaine Feyen, or Coach Blaine, as my personal brand, instead of the Coaching Academy as I’ve realized over the years just how many doors have been opened for me, even though many of the people who have presented opportunities or opened doors for me wouldn’t know the name Real Value Coaching Academy if it was tattooed on my forehead. They know Blaine and that’s what they based their trust on.

We’ve talked about this in prior episodes, but I think it deserves further mention in this episode. In the episode I did last year called ‘Key Person of Influence’, I mentioned the 5 P’s of becoming a KPI (Key Person of Influence), which is basically just another way of saying ‘building your personal brand’. The 5 P’s are; presenting, publishing, productizing, persona, and partnerships. Those are the 5 things you need to focus on and be doing all the time if you want to build a personal brand and become a Key Person of Influence, as Daniel Priestly refers to it.

The big 3 that I want to focus on in this episode as it relates to building a personal brand are presenting, publishing, and persona. Another way to say those is you have to get in front of more people, you have to be creating some kind of content, and you have to develop your backstory and persona to have a digital presence. Think of your digital presence as an owned real estate asset. It’s an asset that you craft and own and it helps you create an ecosystem of opportunities based on the value you deliver to those you’ve chosen as your ideal client, customer, listener, reader, and person you believe you can help.

If you want to build a personal brand in 2024, and I think you’re being left behind if you don’t, you have to find a way to get in front of more people. You can do that in a variety of ways, all of which we’ve discussed before on this show many times. You can write a blog, start a podcast, start a YouTube channel, create on LinkedIn, start a Facebook group(s), speak and teach in person, and the list goes on.

What ‘presenting’ means is that you have to be in front of a lot more people more than you are today, which is probably close to zero for most of you. In his book on becoming a key Person of Influence, Daniel Priestly refers to this as pitching, meaning you have to make a lot more offers to a lot more people about what you do, what you’re offering, how you solve specific problems, and why someone might choose you to solve that particular problem. I’m not a fan of the word ‘pitching’ because it has a bit of a negative connotation and suggests trying to sell something to people that they have no interest in buying. I prefer the word ‘presenting’ much better because presenting connotes showing and storytelling, instead of selling or pitching.

The word ‘presenting’ is also closely tied to the word ‘publishing’, which is the next ‘P’ word in building a personal brand. Publishing simply means putting content out into the world. There has never been a more advantageous time to be putting your thoughts and ideas out into the world.

We live in the internet age, which means almost everyone has the power to be a full blown media company, a content company, a digital publisher, and a thought leader. The way you become a thought leader is first by having thoughts, and then exercising some leadership around those thoughts. A thought leader simply cannot be a thought leader if they’re not leading people somewhere. The best way to get people to follow your ideas is to be publishing them on the internet in some format.

It’s never been easier to start a blog, a podcast, a video diary, and post on social media. By the way, quick note and warning, posting what you and for lunch on social media is not publishing and being a thought leader. That’s just following what all the other normies are doing for dopamine hits. That is not what we’re talking about when we talk about publishing.

When we talk about publishing, we’re talking about creating a following, developing an asset (intellectual property), and moving people to digital real estate that you own. Social media is digital real estate that other people own. It’s absolutely ok to build a following on social media, but the primary goal is to move that following off of social media and onto digital real estate that you own, which is a mailing list, and you do that by having something valuable to offer people by joining your mailing list.

A good example of this is one of our own value offerings which is an hour and twenty minute long video course showing appraisers how to build up their non-lender appraisal business. Many of you listening have already given me your email list in exchange for the video, which I hope was valuable in some way for you. That’s an example of taking people from digital land I may not own to digital land I own, which is my mailing list. With that mailing list, I can continue to add value, help those people get better at what they do, offer coaching products and opportunities, and build what is considered to be an asset.

Download the training on how to build a non-lender appraisal business here: www.CoachBlaine.com/diversify 

So, that’s what it means to publish. The last ‘P’ for this episode is your persona. What is a persona? It’s simply the character you present to the world through the different mediums we’ve discussed here. Of course, when you hear the word ‘character’, you might be thinking that I’m telling you to become somebody you aren’t…and that might actually be what I’m saying. Let me explain.

From age zero to around 35 or so, we are in the process of developing the persona, or character, that we show to the world. From about that age onward, we feel less of a need to further develop our personality and what we show to the world, and we do this for a variety of reasons. One reason is simply that our creativity starts to wane the older we get. Another reason is that we’ve typically figured out what works for us and what doesn’t when it comes to making connections, finding work, and paying bills. Once you settle into a daily routine, a career (whether loved or hated), and you’ve carved a well worn path, you tend to put less effort into the process of becoming and more into simply surviving.

It's actually kind of sad when you are aware of it because you can see it all around you. You see people whose personalities stopped developing at an early age. You see people who lack certain communication skills that could help them get further ahead or make life a little easier, and you meet people for whom you realize could really use somebody in their life being a little more honest with them about their personality.

Am I telling you that you have to become somebody you’re not? Kind of. If you want to be, do, and have something you don’t have yet today, it typically entails becoming somebody you aren’t yet today. Notice that in the phrase ‘be, do, and have’, the ‘be’ part comes first. If you want something, you have to first become somebody who is willing to do that thing. The more you do it, the more you become it, and then you experience it in the world of real things.

I am not telling you to do or become somebody that you don’t want to become, but I am saying that you may have to become somebody you’ve resisted becoming for a long time. If you want to build a strong personal brand, you might just have to step outside of your comfort zone and do some things you’ve avoided doing for the past 20, 30, or 40 years. You may have to start thinking differently in order to behave a little differently. You may have to start behaving differently in order to start getting different results. And you might just have to start polishing up your persona in order to get your thoughts and ideas out into the world.

Once you become a billionaire, you can do and behave however you’d like. Until then, you might just have to take an honest look in the mirror and assess what you might be lacking in terms of communication skills, networking skills, and personality deficiencies that, if developed, would make life a bit easier for you in some way.

So, yes, when it comes to your persona, for some of you I am telling you to become somebody you aren’t yet. Again, not somebody you don’t want to be, just somebody you can see emulating and striving to be in some way, just maybe haven’t developed all of those skills and traits yet.

When it comes to building a personal brand in 2024, which I believe is going to quickly become the new Masters or PhDs when it comes to opening doors, creating opportunities, and creating income for you, you have to take a look at your persona. Tell people your backstory, why you deserve to be listened to, what you have to offer the world, how you can help a specific group of people, and how your solutions are unique and different from all the others out there offering similar solutions.

Presenting, publishing, and your persona. If you want to really get ahead in 2024, building your personal brand will be mandatory. Without a strong personal brand, you’ll always be fighting in a crowded public space for recognition, for dollars, for opportunities, and for the right to be heard.

In the words of rapper, producer, Jay-Z, in a Kanye West song about Blood Diamonds, he says, “I’m not a businessman, I’m a business, man!” The point of all of this is that you are a business if you want to be. You can pour everything into your company and promote that all you wish, but, at the end of the day, when you build yourself up as the brand, a whole new world of opportunities opens up to you that your company brand would be unlikely to give you.

I’ll say it again as we close this episode out: we’re living in an age where things are moving extremely fast. Businesses that were absolutely needed 10 years ago will be obsolete in the next few years. If you aren’t putting any energy into building up your personal brand, you risk being left behind and working for those who have built one up. Brand yourself or be branded by somebody else. The choice is completely up to you.

If you need helping developing your personal brand, just reach out and take me up on a free coaching call. I’m happy to help you get clarity and direction on just how, why, and for whom you should be developing your message for.

Until then, or until next week, I’m out…