I'm a designer who turned into a writer who turned into a startup CEO. My mission is to help creators earn a living. Subscribe for essays on building an audience and earning a living as a creator.
Should you build a personal brand or business brand?
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Hey Reader, If you’re a founder, you might have wondered whether it makes sense to be the face of your company or stay behind the scenes. Should you invest in building your personal brand to benefit the business? If so, how visible should you be? Some people don’t want to be the face of a business and prefer to keep behind the scenes. That’s fine, of course. There are plenty of successful companies you’re probably familiar with where you have no idea who the founder or CEO is. But people connect more with people instead of logos. Companies aren’t relatable, people are. That’s not to say you shouldn’t invest in building a company brand. We certainly do at ConvertKit. But there is a case to be made for making a more human connection. The reason I’ve chosen to invest in building my own personal brand is I believe it can become one of the single biggest drivers for brand awareness and affinity for ConvertKit. When you go on a public quest, build an audience, and tell stories along the way, people feel more invested and they’ll root for you. Building a personal brand alongside the company will lead to more connections, collaborations, partnerships, and opportunities. But how do you build a brand when you also need to run a company? I’m sure you’ve seen some CEOs who look like they’re spending 90% of their time on content creation. At least, it appears that way from the outside. You can’t help but wonder how they’re also managing to run a business. But what looks like someone spending 90% of their time on content can actually be just 5% of their time with the right systems in place. If you don’t have good systems in place, I wouldn’t recommend neglecting the company for your personal brand. I would always choose the comany over your personal brand. The company is going to serve you much better in the long run. If the personal brand dies, the company lives, and you’ll be fine. If the company dies, you’ve got some more problems. My goal is to spend no more than 5% of my time on my personal brand even though it may seem like I’m spending more. This requires a number of things:
1. Flywheels to produce and distribute contentI talk about Creator Flywheels a lot because there’s no better way to scale, create leverage, and consistently increase your results over time. Having flywheels for things like my newsletter and podcast allows me to minimize my time investment and still get results. These flywheels are systems that feed themselves in a kind of positive feedback loop so things get easier as well as produce more results over time. Because of flywheels, all I have to do is show up and deliver my message. Then I can step away and all of the production and distribution happens without me. I don’t spend my time editing or getting caught up in the details. That’s where my team comes in. 2. People running and maintaining flywheelsFlywheels are a great way to create leverage even when you’re building alone, but as much as they save time, they still require someone to run them. Ideally, that person is not you. My team knows my goal is to spend no more than 5% of my time on my personal brand. This means whenever they have some of my time, they need to make the most of it. A single, one-hour call per month is enough for them to interview me to get all of the high-level ideas and topics we can use to produce content for weeks or months to come. Another weekly one-hour interview turns into a YouTube video, podcast episode, and many clips that get posted on different platforms across a number of days. The episode is then promoted in both my newsletter as well as ConvertKit’s. 3. Batch recording whenever possibleAs much as I can, I like to batch record. Whether that’s recording multiple podcast episodes when I visit a city, recording ConvertKit product updates, or just recording videos for my own social media, I try to do them all at the same time. I can get locked in and focused on recording a bunch of things back to back in a small window of time and then go back to focusing on the big picture and running the company. In the near future, we’re aiming to have it where I only need to record miscellaneous content once per month. From that one session, my team will have everything they need to produce content until we record again in a month. This requires quite a bit of coordination and planning, but that’s where the team comes in. It’s well worth it for me to be able to focus on important company decisions. 4. Opting out of the unnecessaryLastly, being able to build a personal brand while running a company also requires opting out of a lot of time-consuming things you could do but probably shouldn’t. This includes things like monitoring content performance and metrics. It’s also easy to get consumed by replies, and comments, and engaging in conversations as they’re happening. You could easily spend 40 hours a week obsessing if you’re not careful. Instead, our production team monitors things like performance and replies and gives me a monthly report I can check at a glance to keep a pulse on things. But that’s a conscious decision I’ve made to opt out of what I don’t need to do and direct my attention to doing the things only I can. It’s all about who knows youI’ve met so many people I didn’t know but who felt like they knew me. It’s all because of my content. When people know you, they trust you. They want to do business with you. They take your recommendations and advice seriously. Content is reputation at scale. By providing educational and entertaining content, I’m able to create a more human connection than what would exist if there was just my company. Because of this connection, hopefully the next time you think about sending a newsletter, or selling digital products, I come to mind and maybe you check out ConvertKit. But aside from someone directly becoming a ConvertKit customer, or attending Craft + Commerce, my personal brand opens doors for me before I even arrive. I’m able to connect with so many incredible people and all kinds of good, often life-changing, things come from that. PODCAST3 Tips to Make $100,000 Writing Books in 2024This week on Billion Dollar Creator, I’m joined by Eric Jorgensen, CEO of Scribe Media. You’ll hear us discuss:
We also talk about Eric’s journey from author to publishing company CEO, the concept of “creator capitalists,” and exactly how Warren Buffet leveraged his public image. If you’re looking to make money as a writer this year, check it out: Watch or listen to episode » Have a great week! —Nathan |
Nathan Barry
I'm a designer who turned into a writer who turned into a startup CEO. My mission is to help creators earn a living. Subscribe for essays on building an audience and earning a living as a creator.
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