What practical benefits does a business gain from the development of the owner's personal brand?
Up until I was 48, I wasn't on social media. At that time, I was deeply immersed in the operational management of my engineering company, Pet Technologies, and genuinely believed that social media was a pointless waste of time. Now, at 53, I have nearly 55,000 followers on my Instagram, and some of my TikTok videos garner over a million views. It seems not a day goes by without me posting new content on social media, and not a month without speaking offline to an audience of entrepreneurs.
What happened over these five years? I stepped away from operations and, to maintain my drive and motivation, I turned to creativity and personal brand development. Initially, as an old-school manufacturing entrepreneur, I viewed this activity as a temporary hobby, but after a year or two, I clearly realized the benefits it brought to both me and my business. Now, I treat personal brand development as a full-fledged project.
Today, my personal brand is my main occupation. I spend two to six hours on it daily. What does it entail? Personal branding involves speaking engagements and preparation, working with a team, photoshoots, writing books and columns. Additionally, a lot of time is spent staying up-to-date with social media trends.
How do you assess its effectiveness? Likes, followers, and views are important to me. But equally important is the practical benefit. What does it consist of? Let me explain.
Public activity makes you interesting to those who are interesting to you. Why do we have a business? Primarily, of course, to achieve material well-being and a desired lifestyle. However, money is just one side of the coin. What's important is the environment we consciously or unconsciously strive for and find ourselves in when we reach a certain level of prosperity. Ultimately, money becomes just a "basic package," a pass into the desired circle of people. The main motivation for movement and development is acceptance, recognition by these people, and the quality of your communication.
The environment, in my opinion, reflects a person's level and dynamics of development. If someone gets stuck in a certain circle for too long, it means there is no movement; it means they are not interesting to a higher-level environment.
What is a higher-level environment? First and foremost, it involves different horizons, quality of ideas, goals, and a different scale of thinking. Thanks to the transformation of my environment in recent years, I have been able to view my business from a different perspective and see many new opportunities for internal development that were previously unclear to me.
The environment reflects what a person broadcasts to the world. If they broadcast nothing new, naturally, they remain stagnant. Personal brand development involves very deep and complex self-work. This is continuous self-improvement, both external and internal. No matter how successful my factory was, staying in operations, going through the workshops day by day, and chewing over numbers in meetings would not have allowed me to expand my mental boundaries as creativity and publicity have done.
To "read" and accept a new person, the environment needs some time. Having active social media and a developed personal brand speeds up this process, as it takes just a few minutes scrolling through social media to understand how interesting this person is and how close they are in values and worldview.
Improving internal communication with the team. Before stepping into the public eye, I had a fear of speaking in front of an audience, including my factory employees. However, for a leader, it's very important to communicate with the team, inspire people not only with words but also with your energy, especially during crises and turbulent times. The easier and more successfully you can convey information, the more effective your management becomes. I understood all this, but each speech was a struggle, requiring long preparation with breathing practices and squats.
Constant public activity over the past five years, the practice of daily video recording for social media, and stage performances have had their effect. The fear is gone. Now I communicate with my company's employees easily, naturally, sincerely, and, as they say, I can inspire. To perform well on stage or on camera, I worked hard on my voice, diction, pauses, and other elements of oratory. Now this helps me inspire and support my people, convey my thoughts better and more convincingly, and unite people around business goals.
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Increasing the effectiveness of external communication. The same principle works in external communication—with suppliers, customers, partners, creditors. The experience and skills honed on social media help me be more relaxed and convincing during negotiations. As your brand grows, so does the company's brand, and you pull it up with you. Thanks to my public activity, the company, which was previously little known to the general public, has started to be mentioned more often, including among potential buyers and creditors. I often repeat: behind the legal entity, there is always a physical person. This is especially relevant in our reality. The values, beliefs, and reputation of the owner directly reflect on the company. In people's minds, the owner and their company are inseparable, they are one.
I spend several million hryvnias a year on personal brand development. I can say that my investments in my personal brand have already paid off if we only consider the value of contracts for purchasing our equipment, where the strength of my brand played a key role.
I've noticed that almost all serious institutions, such as banks, study my social media pages alongside company information. Several times during negotiations in a bank, an interesting situation occurred. I would start explaining something, and they would respond: Oleksandr, we know about you, we are subscribed to you. Personally, it makes communication much easier for me.
Attracting new foreign contracts. My experience in building a personal brand highlighted an important point: the main thing is to show simple, real life without filters and advertising. You don't need to create the illusion of success; it's important to show ordinary moments: here's you getting up, taking a walk, recording something. Simple life builds trust because people see not only celebrations but also everyday life.
I applied this approach to the company: I encouraged our communications people to show the everyday life of the company. Here, the guys are tweaking something in the workshop, here they have a break, and here we are shipping a finished product. We started publishing such materials on social media, LinkedIn, and Facebook. Three months later, we had a client from Peru. He was surprised: "So you really work? But there's a war!" He bought a machine from us—the truth without embellishments. Now it has turned out to be more important than beauty and aesthetics.
I wouldn't have understood this deep essence if I hadn't started developing my personal brand. Previously, it all boiled down to standard templates: a beautiful video, achievement reports, showy success. Now we simply show everyday life. The simple life of the factory builds trust.
A personal brand allows you to better understand yourself and your goals. A personal brand is not only about creating a public image but also about deep self-exploration. When you start developing your brand, you reveal different aspects of your nature and demonstrate them to the world. And it's not always what seems important or interesting to you that attracts others. Often it's the opposite: you may consider your depth and intellect your hallmark, but people might like your openness or lightness more.
Developing a personal brand helps you focus on yourself, better understand who you really are. It's comparable to spiritual development. A personal brand is a continuous work on yourself that requires effort and self-reflection. I can definitely say that I've never worked on myself as much as I have in these five years. I often joke: I've never worked as hard as now, even when I was working.