5 Personal Brand Moves I Should Have Made Sooner to Massively Grow My Business

If you're reading this newsletter, you're either starting to build your personal brand, or you've been at it a little while. No matter which of these two buckets you fall into, I’ll give you an abbreviated overview of my personal brand and business journey so you can identify where you’re at in your journey and how to speed up your momentum.

My first year of business…

I officially left my corporate job as a marketing manager to start my own business. My goal was to produce courses to help small businesses like restaurants and accounting firms develop a refined, mature brand.

I quickly realized I needed to make income, though. So, I started taking on contracts as a fractional marketing manager for these types of businesses.

My second year of business…

I realized that the founders of the small businesses I worked with had inspirational stories about what made them start their businesses. I shifted into personal brand consulting to help amplify them.

My third year of business…

By now, I was sharing my own journey of growing my business on LinkedIn, and most of my entrepreneurial clients wanted to build their brand in the same way, so I began advising them on how to do so.

During my fourth and fifth years of business…

I had a mixture of some retainer clients I was creating personal brand content for, some coaching clients, and I launched my first online course, The Influence Academy. It did OK in terms of sales, even though my students went on to be prolific, recognizable names on the platform. I never seemed to have enough time to push it, so it died on the vine as I focused on lucrative retainers and coaching.

During my sixth and seventh years of business…

I decided to ramp up the content production for personal brands by starting an agency. We grew crazy fast during the pandemic, sailing past the $1 million mark with a team of nine at one point. I was burnt out selling new clients, managing a team, trying to establish processes, etc. My brand went MIA on the platform, and I longed for the days of returning to selling courses and doing coaching.

At the end of year seven…

Reaching ultimate burnout, I transitioned my team to some partner agencies and returned all the way back to the semi-start, prioritizing producing my own content and teaching professionals how to build their brands through courses, corporate training and workshops, and group coaching.

I now enjoy manageable work hours, have refocused on my health, landed a "top personal branding voice" on LinkedIn, and my audience, newsletter subscribers, and sales have blown through the roof.

So why am I sharing all of this?

To let you know that it took me seven years of rolling a boulder up a hill, having it roll back and crush me, and pushing it up again to get to a proverbial tipping point where finally, FINALLY, I feel like “it’s all happening.”

If I can save you even a little bit of time on that learning curve so you can get there faster than I did, it will all have been worth it to me.

Here are the 5 things I wish I had done sooner to accelerate my “tipping point.”

1. Replace networking events with content and community-building hours.

I used to easily spend 9 hours a week on events:

• About 3 hours to commute to them
• About 4 hours at the events
• About 2 hours doing follow-up

On a good week, my efforts usually translated to 4 quality conversations that might have eventually led to sales.

Everything else was just kind of "tire kickers."

Plus, I was physically drained.?

So, I ran a thought experiment. What if I just cold-turkeyed the events and used even half the time (4.5 hours/week) to create content?

When I did that for one solid year...?

• My following grew by 5k
• My inbound leads shot up
• My sales increased, as did my profitability because I wasn't spending as much time on cost per lead
• My energy was restored
• My creativity shot up

Now, I get to pick and choose which events I attend (I reserve in-person for educational events and retreats with communities I believe in), and most of the time, I attend traditional networking events because I'm a speaker or I want to cheer on a client. (Because the organizers found me on LinkedIn).

2. Refine one offering.

When it came to my services and solutions in former business models, I was kind of like Burger King...my proposals pretty much said, “Have it your way.”

Instead of finding my dream clients — those who had a need that my core offering solved and shared my values — I would take on anyone with a problem relatively in my wheelhouse and a budget to pay for it. I thought this made me “boutique” and “custom,” and sure, there are entire consultancy businesses that revolve around deep custom solutions for their clients.

But that wasn’t what I wanted to build, and it sure as heck isn’t as easy to scale because the offer isn’t clear, replicable, and reliable. It also made my sales process longer. When every solution is unique, so too are the conversations and processes for delivering them. In this way, I was burning hours on calls instead of empowering customers to buy with high-value offerings.

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3. Stick to one platform.

I was on two platforms for most of my business — LinkedIn and Instagram— and it was one too many. My attention was split between the two as I tried to keep up with different types of content and trends. The result was I never gained massive momentum on either.

The thing with quickly building your personal brand is that “more is not more” when it comes to social media channels. You need to prove yourself on one channel first. What do I mean by “prove yourself?” You need to demonstrate that you can build a highly-engaged audience and then sell successfully them something. Until you do that on ONE channel, you have no business taking on another. Doing so prematurely means you’ll kill momentum on both and get burnt out with marketing in the meantime.

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4. Hire a business operations expert, even if a few hours a week, ASAP.

I’m an ideas and “vision” person. I love creating, selling, and teaching. I have fun every day in my business because it pays me to do all three. However, when it comes to the behind-the-scenes, nitty-gritty details and systems of creating, selling, and teaching, I’m woefully uninterested and unqualified. It’s just not in my DNA. But it is in the DNA of my business operations director, Pam.

This woman could run a small nation. Truly. She shines at everything I don’t thrive at — which is predominately systems. In fact, the reason I know my first product launch died on the vine, and my subsequent ones have been blockbusters, is because of her involvement.

My advice? If you are a “big picture” person, even if you can only afford a business manager a couple of hours a week, get one. They’ll execute your ideas in ways you didn’t even know were possible.

5. Refine the practice of financial forecasting.

My forecasting and budgeting process used to be throwing spaghetti at a wall every January and seeing what sticks during the subsequent 11 months. As mentioned above, this was a side effect of the fact that no two solutions I offered looked the same. When your clients' needs dictate the scope of work, you may have a rough idea of what you’ll earn, but it will always vary based on who walks through the door.?

After getting crystal clear on my offerings, though,?I found the opposite to be true.?I now knew the exact price point of every product and program and how many of each of those products and programs I needed to sell?every month to hit my mark. Fulfilling quotas was now a matter of finding clients that fit my goals vs. waiting for clients to find me to fit theirs. Because of this, my forecasting has become scary accurate, and I’m enjoying the clarity of knowing the steps to take to hit targets I never hit before.

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The Recap

With each level of growth comes new insights. At this point in my business, I’m learning new things I didn’t know I didn’t know, like diving into even more complex metrics for email list health and more. It’s the next “lever” to pull in this new stage, and I’m excited for all the ones I’ll get to pull in the future.

But, if you aren’t at a place where you are reliably monetizing and growing your expertise in a way that gives you freedom and time to enjoy your business, try looking into each of the five steps above and see which lever you may pull to get to the next level.

Wondering where you're at on your personal brand journey and the next steps to take to unlock success?

??Find out how to rapidly scale and monetize your personal brand by taking this free Personal Brand Growth Assessment .