#69 - Guess What? You Have A Personal Brand

Hey Bob, guess what? 

It's another episode of Let's Chat Sales. Let's Chat Sales!

And this time, you may recall just recently we talked about branding and your brand 

Feels like just a few moments ago. Time flies 

It doesn't, it was like a, you know, for the listener it's probably a week ago, but...

Alright, but that's

Unless they're going through them, binging them, in which case they're one after another. 

Right? 

Who would wanna do that? 

I mean, the melodious sounds of Bob and Brendan 

By the way, helpful hint to those of you who haven't figured it out already. 

You can watch these or listen at 1.5 times the speed and you will get a lot more accomplished in life. 

And I sound pretty good faster.

We all do, alright, so that aside, we're gonna talk about today is the difference between, 

or how to think about your personal brand versus a company brand. 

Okay. 

How's that sound? 

That sounds great. I like it. 

This came up because of the Pioneer program and we were talking of the individuals in this class

that I'm teaching around for very early-stage startups.

And in some cases the business is an individual and in some cases the business is a company. 

And so that kind of warrants thinking about how you brand the, the business. 

Right.

Right. 

So what do you, what are your thoughts? 

Well, my thoughts, I have a company that's me. 

Yeah. 

And so I brand it around me.

Yeah. 

You know. 

And it's very easy having done branding with bigger companies. 

Yeah. 

It's a whole lot easier to brand when it's just you. 

Yeah. Right. 

Cause I can stay on message. I can go way off message very easily. 

Yeah. 

With the company it becomes more complicated because every person has to be consistent in that brand message.

Right. 

And that can be how they dress, what they say, how they talk about your company mission, how they talk about your customers. 

Yeah. 

You know, there are a lot of factors there and I think where I think the gray area becomes is, I have a company that's just me. 

But my vision would be that my company would be more than me at one point.

Yeah. 

And so how do I make that transition? 

How do I go from it's Bob's company and thankful. And I did one thing, I didn't name it after me. 

Yeah. 

That was an intentional choice at the beginning. 

Cause I was like, if it gets big, I don't want it to be Bob Graham and Associates.

I love seeing my name in print, but when you guys sell Bob Graham and Associates not so good. 

Yeah.

And, this is a thing when it comes to selling, and that is, you know, if it's your own name, it's hard to do that. 

But the same time there are, there's significant advantages to having a company be named after you. 

Right. 

Having your, you know, Brendan McAdams dot.com, you know and have everything directed to

you if you're a sole proprietorship. 

Right. 

Or if you're your own business.

But the downside is when you do that, you're right. 

It's hard to sell that, it's hard to scale it. 

Right?

At some level. 

Right? 

Who wants to come work for Brendanmcadams.com? 

Right. 

And, and yeah. 

Because if you do, ultimately the customer's gonna want you. 

They're gonna want, they're the person on the letter. 

Correct. 

And so that's not a bad thing, but it does change the dynamic of the company, the potential for

the company and so forth.

And, and you see this in a lot of industries. 

Dental practices tend to be the name of the person. 

Yeah. 

And there's been a trend in the last four or five years. 

There's a lot of the older dentists wanna sell. 

Yeah. 

That they'll change the name of their practice from Joe Blow Dental and Associates to, you know,

Happy Valley Dental

Right. 

But the problem and I have a buddy who's going through this process right now

dental practices that get bought, they need multiple dentists in that business.

They're not that interested in 

Correct. 

one person. 

So if you're a one person dental shop or you're a one person consulting shop.

You can name yourself kinetics as I have,

and it really doesn't help you that much if you don't have a team of people behind you.

So, right. 

So..

Are you offering me a job now, Brendan? 

Is that what that was? 

You kinda have a job here as it is your sidekick extraordinaire. 

And

Wow. 

Perks of that 

that means a lot. 

Coming from an Entrepreneur and Residence, I'm just

we can't, we can't get outta that,

that mode like that has to be mentioned at least once in every

I skipped it last time. 

I feel really bad. 

Oh, good. 

Good point. 

So anyway, that's the way I'm thinking of, so a personal brand and now say we're, we wanna go

after and develop our personal brand. 

What are you thinking to do that? 

Like what does it take to make that happen? 

I think it's how you dress, how you act, where you go.

Yep. 

I had a period in my career where I was doing a lot of networking events and I realized that I was

doing networking events with a certain level of client. 

Yeah.

And not the level of client I was looking for.

Yeah. 

And I was well known in a pond. 

That wasn't the pond I wanted to swim in.

Right, Right. 

So I had to change my game. 

So it's where you hang out? 

Yep. 

I think it's how your website looks.

I think it's how you respond to people.

If you get back to them the same day, that's different than if you don't get back to 'em ever or wait a week. 

Right. 

I was talking to someone last week who was complaining about a service provider 

cuz they were trying to get on that person's calendar and the calendar was

booked out for the next three weeks.

Yeah. 

And that was really frustrating. 

First it's like, I'm ready to buy this, but I wanna talk to him first. 

I'm not waiting three weeks. 

Right. 

It's where you are on social media and, and how you behave on social media. 

And how you behave as a company and also how you behave as an individual.

Right. 

Because don't believe that if you put your first name and middle name instead of your last name,

people aren't gonna figure out it's you. 

Right. 

Well, the funny thing about that too is now if you, if you have employees. 

In your business, right? 

That's a complication, 

right? 

They, they now want to have on their LinkedIn profile, their own thing.

They may not wanna have your company message 

They may be an employee yours, but they're gonna have their own brand.

And so there's a fair amount of confusion that can take place if you've got people that are active

employees in your company, 

but they're on Twitter as themselves, they're on LinkedIn or Instagram 

And they may be critical of your company. 

I was at a staff meeting today that went for four hours. It could have been done in 15 minutes. 

Yeah, right. 

I read that on Twitter just a couple days ago.

Yeah. Yeah. 

And someone's gonna read that and be like, Wow, where's this? 

I know where this person works. 

That company must be really inefficient. 

Yeah. Yeah. 

So you, you know, those sorts of things are things that, that I kind of wrestle with, in terms of

creating a personal brand. 

You having a profile, having a like having a bio, like a good, well written bio that you can always

have like available. 

I have, I use a text compression, what do you call it?

Text expander. 

And I have like a, a little. 

Z B I O B Z B I O and if I hit that, it provides a little one paragraph file that I can use, that I can

share with you Mr. Technology.

Yeah. 

And I, you know, so having a nice bio 

photograph that of you, that's worst media or marketing, you know, 

if you have the great picture of you with the hand on the shoulder because you cut out the three

guys that you were hanging out. 

Or the woman that you're dating. 

Yeah. 

And you just see the arm on the shoulder. 

That's different than having a professional headshot where you know the background applies. 

Yep. 

There's a lot of little things that go into a personal brand. 

Right? 

Yep. 

So, but having a one pager about who you are and what you do, I think that's, that can be useful.

It speaks to the customer. 

Yeah, it speaks to the customer and allows them to answers questions

about who you are and what you do and how you can help. 

I think that's huge. 

And inexpensive.

It's not hard to do something like that and have well done, have someone, you know, 

either clean it up on Canva or, or have someone in Fiverr, make it really attractive as a pdf.

Right. 

having consistent messaging is a big thing to me. 

Yep. 

You know, that if I look at your website and I look at your brochure 

Yep. 

I feel like I'm dealing with the same company. 

Yep. 

Look and feel some of the similar language. 

Having people say that a mission statement is really important to a personal brand, what's the

person trying to accomplish in life?

Yeah. 

Having a like a website, do you spend money on a website? 

How much do you need to spend. 

There are really good little websites you can do for, for essentially pennies. 

Now, Canva, I'm not, Canva, Carrd is one. 

You can go to Wix, you can go to Go Daddy 

Squarespace, and they're, they can be pretty inexpensive.

They can be a time sink in some cases. 

You don't need to spend a lot on, on that sort of stuff, 

I don't think you need to spend money on letterhead these days. 

Right. 

No, I mean, and we, we talked about whether or not you need a business card 

Well, it's, it's funny, we were at an invent together earlier 

or last week and a guy there was talking about Blinq, B L I N Q.

Yeah. 

And I downloaded that and I've built my business card on that and I've used it three times so far.

Yeah. Yeah. 

And I have, I use Hi, hello. Same sort of thing.

It's just the after. And so you can. 

Their, and that would depend largely on who you're going to interact with. 

I deal with a lot of older people and they ask for business cards.

Yeah. 

So I have a business card. 

I actually play the parlor game with them. Like, Hey, I got this thing. 

Can you pull your phone out? 

Yeah. 

And can you scan this barcode? 

And there there's like fascinated by 

Yeah. Yeah. 

This new technology, like how do you do that? 

Yeah, that's right. 

So that can be a but, and that can also be part of my brand right?

Right. 

I bring to these people, technology that they wouldn't otherwise use, 

and I'm willing to take the time to explain it to them, right? 

Rather than go, Oh, you don't know this. 

What's wrong with you? 

Yeah. So

and subtle things like that play into your brand. 

Yeah. 

That's, that's good. Well, I mean, anything else?

No, I think we've given people a lot of hints and of course, Brendan, 

if someone's confused by this, or perplexed you would love to talk to 'em about, right? 

Yeah, happily. 

Yeah.

And launching the course, check it out in the doobly-doo. 

It's kiinetics.com/salesaccelerator. 30 days. It's just sprint 30 day sprint.

That will get you five new prospects in your pipeline. 

Or your money back. 

So more details. 

Oh, I'm gonna take you up on that one, I think. 

All right. 

All right, Bob. Good tip, right? 

We'll do it again. 

You bet. See you, man. 

See ya.

That was another episode of Let's Chat Sales a quick one, of course.

And I hope it was helpful. And

if it was please like, and subscribe and more importantly, share it with your friends. There should

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