How Founders Can Leverage Personal Branding to Scale Their Company to $10 Million+

Discover how Brian Smith, the visionary founder of Strategy Ladders, turned the adversity of losing all his clients during the COVID-19 pandemic into a golden opportunity. By harnessing the power of his personal brand, Brian built a thriving consulting business with over 40 consultants to $10 Million in annual revenue using personal branding. This episode is packed with insights, including how Brian overcame his fear of posting on LinkedIn, stayed authentic, and distinguished himself by challenging misleading influencers. Learn the art of attracting high-ticket clients through storytelling and consistently sharing valuable business insights.

We then explore the intricacies of building personal brand loyalty within a service-based consultancy. Brian shares his experiences on the potential pitfalls of a business overly reliant on a single individual and the importance of cultivating a team-oriented culture. Discover how nurturing personal brands for everyone on your team can foster loyalty and enhance retention, all while maintaining strong leadership to ensure a cohesive and supportive work environment. This discussion sheds light on the nuances of running a consultancy without paid advertising, emphasizing organic growth strategies through platforms like LinkedIn.

Finally, we delve into the critical role of LinkedIn in amplifying business success, especially for companies with revenues under $25 million. Brian underscores the importance of personally managing your LinkedIn presence to refine your Ideal Customer Profile and Unique Selling Proposition. We discuss actionable strategies for creating engaging content, the effectiveness of controversial topics to attract mature clients, and the necessity of being personable and visible to potential clients. This episode is a must-listen for anyone looking to master personal branding for business growth and long-term success.

Visit the Remarkable Marketing Podcast website to see all our episodes.

Visit the Remarkable Marketing Podcast on YouTube

Remarkable Marketing Podcast Highlights on Instagram

Eric Eden on LinkedIn

Transcript

Turning Personal Brand Into Company Brand

Eric Eden 0:00

Welcome to today's episode. Today, we are talking about personal branding and how to turn a personal brand into a company brand. We have a great guest today to help us talk about it. Brian, welcome to the show.

Brian Smith 0:13

Thank you.

Eric Eden 0:13

Eric Stoked to be here, so why don't we start off by you sharing just a minute or two about who you are and what you do?

Brian Smith 0:22

Yeah, so I'm a more or less lifelong entrepreneur after escaping investment banking almost 17 years ago, and I've run quite a few different businesses, everything from commercial real estate development and property management, a chain of coffee shops, also a large networking group for founders, but today I run Strategy Ladders, which is a B2B consulting company focused on B2B service businesses. So we help agencies, events companies, property management companies and even some more interesting ones like virtual restaurant companies.

Eric Eden 1:01

Oh, very cool. Personal branding is a huge topic here on our podcast, and so I think a common issue a lot of business leaders and founders face is how do you transform having a personal brand into something that scales, into a company with multiple people taking it forward, and I think you have an inspiring story about this. We'd love to hear it.

Brian Smith 1:26

Absolutely. I actually now live in Mexico. I'm in Mexico City now, but when COVID hit, I was actually working with. I had great clients that paid really well, but they were all in the experiential marketing space. So by April 1st 2020, we had either shut down or what we called winterized those businesses. I went from a very nice cash flow to none, and this was on the back of coming out of a divorce and I hadn't saved much money at that point.

Brian Smith 1:55

Fast forward I had started an agency, took an exit out of that agency after about a year because it just wasn't the right partners, and I had, for the first time in my life, taken a job, and that job lasted five weeks. So I've been officially employed for five weeks out of the last 17 years. But I got let go from that job and that was cash flow I was counting on as I crossed the border to move all the way down to Southern Baja California Sur. So my family and I crossed the border with about $6,800. Most of that was already committed to rent and security deposit, and when I got there, I needed to start over. I didn't have a company brand, I didn't have money in the bank, and so I, for the first time, got over my fear of posting on LinkedIn and started getting on there and just being very raw and very vulnerable. But I used my story of living in Baja California Sur with my family as a way to stand apart and also insert business stories and business topics and I was able to scale solo to about $650,000 a year just using my personal brand. But I got to the point where I was doing a 44 hour a week consulting so I have 44 hours a week of consulting calls and I realized, hey, I'm going to, I've reached a cap here. I can either try to push up prices or figure out another way to scale. And so I was really sitting on this.

Brian Smith 3:31

Yeah, so one of the main things that I was focused on is in getting over sort of my fear of posting, because for years I was the guy that bought the podcast mic but never started the podcast, or I'd post on LinkedIn and then not do it again for three months. And I just started to say, look, I'm going to give everything away. I'm going to share everything I know from at that point, the last 14 years of business. And so I shared stories. I shared a lot of my personal insights. But one of the things that I did is I realized look, at the end of the day, power is polarity and polarity is power.

Brian Smith 4:13

So there was a lot of people, especially then and still now the fluff fluencers, the ones that are out there posting about how to get big on LinkedIn, how to just really get the social numbers up, but the reality is none of that actually translates into anything. That is a high ticket business, and so what I ended up doing is actually going in and breaking down. They would post, hey, I made this much money. And they'd put another post up and saying, oh, I spend 12 hours a day on LinkedIn and I would do the breakdowns and I would show that their numbers don't add up and I would show that if you really were following what they were doing, that the result would be something that the vast majority of people would not A find livable or B would be happy with. So by literally going in and calling out the influencers and utilizing that as a way to differentiate myself, what I was able to do is separate myself from the people that were just going after numbers and instead start attracting the real business owners that were in it to make a profit and they're the ones that also have the money to spend, to spend. So I can proudly say I've been blocked by the vast majority of those influencers today, because when they post things and I repost them and break down what they're doing, they don't like it. And I really started triumphing the measure of revenue per follower and what you find is when you get up past about 20,000 followers, there is a exponential drop in the amount of money that you make per follower. So even today we have clients that are making upwards of $2,000 per follower with under 5,000 followers. But you look at some of the large influencers and they're lucky if they make a dollar per follower. And so by really triumphing that and pushing that, it really caused my ICP to self-identify and come out and want to identify with me and connect with me, and that was one of the key things that I used to differentiate myself.

Brian Smith 6:17

But while I did that, I really did my best to write and communicate in exactly the way I communicate. What I found was my best posts were ones where I sat down. I forced myself. 6 am every morning, six to seven, was sitting in front of the computer doing my LinkedIn and I would sit down, had my protocol, I'd go through, but I had to write the post and then post it, and anything that I sat on and edited tanked. Anything that I sat down and just posted without reviewing, those are the ones that took off and people got to know me and my style and even at times when I had hired someone to help me write immediately, people would message me and say, hey, you didn't write that, did you? Because I developed that style in such a way that people could identify hey, you were going to go to Brian's profile, because it's no BS, there's nothing but truth coming through when Brian's posting. And so what that also started to do is help develop other successful consultants that had come to me and say, hey, can we partner up?

Brian Smith 7:21

But at the time I hadn't figured out how to do that yet, and that was that real unlock, where I went from communicating in such a way that was really straightforward and really the way that I communicate in person and with clients. I then went the next step and said, okay, how do I scale this, how do I take this to the next level? And that was the big unlock. Yeah, so I like a lot of consultants and founders. I have a pretty wide range of experience, and so when I was working with founders, I would be working with people who had a specific issue, but I was able to address multiple issues within their business, and I realized it's going to be really hard for me to find someone with a similar background as me, and this is pretty common. I see this with people that are branding consultants. I see this with people that are in doing high-level marketing strategy. I see this with all different types of consultants, agencies and so forth, and so the founder gets locked in, and so I sat down and I said, okay, what are the things that I'm not the absolute best at? And so I realized, hey, I'm really excellent at this small area, but all of these other things I'm working on I'm not the best at, or I just hate doing them.

Brian Smith 8:38

I came from an investment banking background and it's like pulling teeth to have me sit down in front of a spreadsheet today, and so what I did is I went out and found all of the experts that were extremely good at the areas that I was just pretty okay at, and as I started to put this team together, I realized you know, number one, I'm going to have to shift this away from being a brand about me, and what I did was where most people go out and hire a ghostwriter for themselves and hire a strategist for themselves. I did that for everyone else on my team instead, and I specifically was targeting people who not only had a lot of experience in their space, but also a great following. So each one of these hires was not just a strategic hire insofar as helping them develop their, develop their, develop the client's businesses, but also help develop our business, and so what we were able to do is now create an entire team of people who are experts, where I was on a call with with a prospect the other day and they said, oh, I just followed this person and this person because I saw they joined your team and I know that if they're on your team, they're LinkedIn royalty, because at that point, what they're doing, what we've done, is we've created a huge part of our business that is around media, and what that's allowed me to do is many of my posts are highlighting my team now and it's allowing me to fade into the background. My team now, and it's allowing me to fade into the background, my team now, are the ones that are carrying this brand, where now people know, when they go to strategy ladders, there's a team of people who are extremely good at what they do, and whether it's our clients or new prospects, when I introduce them to somebody, they now say, oh, I've been following this person for the last three months. I know Austin lives in Denver and he's got a four-year-old right. Yeah, he does.

Brian Smith 10:32

And so by really developing this and doing it in a personal way, I've been able to build up the personalities of everybody in our team but, at the same time, build the brand where people know that the folks that work with us, that have strategy ladders on their profile, that they are exceptionally good at what they do. And so it's taken a lot of the pressure off of me where now many of the leads that our company gets is no longer through my profile. They come through. We get just as many through a lot of the other people on our team now through their profiles, because I've been able to step away and now, as we start launching new channels podcasts, youtube and so forth it's now having people go to that brand because they know that there's these phenomenal people associated with that brand. So where we used to be.

Brian Smith 11:19

We hit the point of diminishing returns within LinkedIn within just my account. We're now able to diversify that and also bring in different entry points, because some people don't necessarily identify with me, but they might identify with Douglas, who's based in Madrid and originally from Venezuela. They might connect with Josh, who has a very different background than me as well. So by putting these out there, what we've done is diversify our online profile, creating multiple different, even within LinkedIn, channels that people can come through and, at the same time, build a brand around these people. And now, at this point, the brand itself is attracting phenomenal people who come to us every single week asking if they can join the team, as well as clients basically nonstop week asking if they can join the team, as well as clients, basically nonstop. We're generating, on an average day, five plus leads a day just through inbound on LinkedIn.

Eric Eden 12:14

Wow, that's great. I think building up the personal brand of all the people that you add to your team is a great strategy. It's not necessarily the strategy that a lot of other people have followed. If you look at the extreme examples of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, they didn't really build up a whole team of people that had a personal brand, and I think there's a downside to that, because you take Elon Musk, a semi-controversial person, and people love him or they hate them. But if they hate them, it's probably not a positive because there's not other people at Tesla or X that have the same sort of brand that people could gravitate towards. So I like your strategy of building up the personal brand of people on the team rather than just doubling down on yourself and then trying to get like more support Like that's. You can't argue with the success that it's worked for some people, but you have to wonder if, for most businesses, the strategy you outlined is better.

Brian Smith 13:21

When you look at some of the businesses that are similar to what we run, because we run a consultancy, so it's a service-based business. When you look at there's great people out there, there's people on the extreme end like Tony Robbins, but if you look at somebody that's in a similar space as us, someone like Dan Martell, where he's running a $40 to $60 million a year business, but it all hinges on him, he's the linchpin at the end of the day, and to me, that's a scary way to run business. Some people love creating content every single moment of the day, but I can tell you from experience that also takes away from your ability to do a lot of really cool, interesting things in business if all you're doing is creating content. And so, as a CEO running a team of over 40 people at this point which, I should add, we just two days ago was the three-year anniversary of my very first client in the business and we're on track to break eight figures this year and this was with no investment, just almost entirely through LinkedIn and by leveraging that diversity, I'm not creating that linchpin that someone like a Dan Martell or folks like that are creating for themselves. And if you look at how they got there.

Brian Smith 14:32

Almost every single one of them broke eight figures through paid ads. They didn't do it organically. We haven't paid for a single ad to date. We haven't paid for a placement, we haven't paid for anything, and that's one of the things that really differentiates us in our approach, because while we do have paid, coming in our future by really focusing on, it's a little bit like if you've only been in the gym for three months, it's probably not a good idea to start steroids.

Brian Smith 14:59

So why not figure out how to first build out that strength, figure out how your ICP really works and do it organically, and then start juicing it with paid? And this approach is one that, unfortunately, we don't see a lot of people take, because even our clients that we work with, when we encourage them to take this approach, the concern is always what if I spend all this money and time to develop someone's personal brand and then they leave? And I think that's one of the big failures in leadership. It's that your job is to build up your people as best as you possibly can and then create an environment that they don't want to leave. That's where I think people stumble.

Eric Eden 15:40

I 100% agree. What I have seen is that a lot of people have told me they don't want to do personal branding, to build up their personal brand, because if their leadership or their CEO sees it, they might get negatively affected, not promoted, or people assume that they're going to leave the company just because they're working on their personal brand, and I think that is a lack of leadership, like you're saying, because the ideal thing to do is to have a discussion with your leadership about it, if you're building your personal brand, and perhaps tell them listen, I'm loyal, but this is something I want to do. I think it's going to be helpful to the company and you don't have to worry about me leaving. It's not a disloyalty thing. I just want to build up my personal brand and just communicating about it I think solves a lot of that issue is what I've seen. But have you seen something similar or do you have a different recommendation if people have that concern?

Unlocking Personal Branding for Business Growth

Brian Smith 16:38

So I'm somebody that I generally am working with C-level clients, and so I recommend that this starts from the top and that they take the leadership in encouraging their team to do it. I think that if you're in a different situation, where you don't have that type of leadership in your company, that then stepping up and speaking to them and showing them how it can be beneficial is very valuable, and in fact so. We have some clients that are in the LinkedIn space and we've helped them effectively sell to corporate teams that otherwise weren't really considering personal branding, and one of the most effective visuals that we've helped our clients create around this is, if you think of a Venn diagram, at the center being the business itself, right, but then when you look at and there's core competencies of that business, but people aren't just buying into the business, they're buying into the people, and, as the way people buy today is very different than it was even five years ago, that personal connection is paramount, and so what we found is, with that type of leadership, when you think of again, center of the Venn diagram is the business, and overlapping that then, to different extents, are all of the different influential people within the business, and you then have a much wider range of topics and expertise that people can tap into when they come to your business, and so by doing that it actually increases sort of the target area where you can catch people's attention and still guide them towards the business. So I think if you can envision that just the Venn diagram at the center and then all of these other circles of influence around it that's one way that we've seen C-level convinced of this type of personal branding being effective. Now the way that we implement it in our company is we actually have a meeting every single week where we sit down, we talk about topics that are current.

Brian Smith 18:45

We talk, we have, of course, we're doing some trend analysis and seeing what some of the big loudmouths in the community are saying the whore moseys and people like that and sometimes we decide to make content that goes counter to what they're saying or exposing why we believe they're wrong and what they're telling. But the other thing that we do then is we pair off people on our team after those conversations and we put people in basically interviews with one another and just record a 30 to 45 minute conversation. That one 30 to 45 minute conversation creates literally months of content, both written and video. And when we do that now at scale and we're doing that across a lot of key members of our company, we have this content engine that we're still largely controlling the narrative, talking about the things that are valuable to our customer. But it just takes a little bit of everyone's time and a dedicated writer and video editor to keep up. But it doesn't take much to implement it. But once you make it part of your company culture, then you're celebrating everybody's wins as well.

Eric Eden 20:01

I like that strategy and did I hear it right that part of the way that you get traction for all of the team members with their personal brand is you try to be a little bit controversial, like you did yourself? Is that part of the formula? Because if you're just spouting out their buzzwords and agreeing with everybody else, that doesn't really get a lot of attention right.

Brian Smith 20:25

Absolutely no. It's not just that, it's even just exposing our culture, because we have a very culture. We're a remote team. I'm based in Mexico. We have people on every single continent. We have clients on every continent except for Africa and, of course, antarctica, but we really use that as a way to highlight our approach, too. We speak the way we speak with clients. We approach things the exact same way we approach things with clients, and so there's a lot of people that will watch these videos or even read our content and say, hey, you guys are the team I want to work with because you don't talk about these issues in the same way.

Brian Smith 21:04

Another thing that we're known for calling out is the holy grail of entrepreneur operating systems is EOS, and the thing is, eos was created over 20 years ago, long before we had iPhones, and it's a very antiquated approach to running a business, and while it works for some businesses, there's a lot of businesses that just need any structure at all.

Brian Smith 21:30

But by going out and being the ones, instead of triumphing EOS which is almost what every single one of our competitors does we actually go out and speak out against it, and one of the benefits of that and I think this is something that a lot of people could apply to their own marketing by speaking out against what's sort of the status quo. We also get more mature clients as a result, because they've gone out and they've tried it themselves and they realize it doesn't work for them. And it's just like we have a lot of agency clients who say we never want to be somebody's first agency because they don't want to deal with that uptake, they don't want to deal with that education, and so we can bypass that by being that counter argument to status quo in the market.

Eric Eden 22:15

That's super interesting that being controversial and taking the counter point of view can be that productive. It's not logical that would be the result, but I think it makes sense when you explain it, that you do get even better clients sometimes when you take the opposite point of view or you're controversial. That's really cool. What else can you share with entrepreneurs, founders and leaders who want to grow a multimillion dollar business that we haven't talked about broadly, any other things that you recommend to your clients that you could share?

Brian Smith 22:52

So a couple of things. First off, if you're under 10 million and you're refusing to do personal branding, you're never going to break 10 million. In fact, we have turned down clients because they've said there's no way that I'm going to be posting online. I don't want to be the face of the company. The thing is, the way people buy today is they want to know who they're buying from. So get out there, be personable. I put a selfie or a photo from my life up with every single post and so by the time someone talks to me, they're like I know you, I know about your kids, I know that you live in Mexico city, I saw the pinata at your kid's party and things like that. So that's one. But then the other is very quickly, entrepreneurs want to hand this off because it is time consuming. Very quickly, entrepreneurs want to hand this off because it is time consuming.

Brian Smith 23:40

But when you think about what LinkedIn is and I'm harping on LinkedIn for two reasons. Number one, as we all know, you can identify exactly who someone is, their role in the company, what their company is and their influence level. But the other is using Sales Navigator, you can bias towards people who are active on the platform and whereas on other platforms you might be messaging people that never log in or never really active, with LinkedIn you can bias towards that. So now, if you take that and then you couple it with dialing in your ICP and your offer which every business at that size really every business under 25 million still has a lot of work to do on their offer and so what LinkedIn provides you with and this is why I've had founders of $25 million a year companies and told them no, you got to fire the people on your LinkedIn team because you need to get back into it, because you still drive 90 plus percent of the revenue, and LinkedIn allows you to. If you use it correctly.

Brian Smith 24:41

Between creating content and doing outbound, you have the ability to dial in not only your ICP but your USP, your value proposition and the messaging that gets people to buy. And three months spent dedicated to spending time on LinkedIn and developing those aspects of your business is worth more than any amount of outside agency coming in and working with you. There's literally not a more valuable thing to do. But, unfortunately, a lot of agency owners and business owners, it's one of the first things that they outsource to a very low cost employee and, as we tell our clients in the service space, your offer is your business and your business is your offer. And if you're outsourcing, dialing in your ICP and your offer and that messaging to somebody who's getting paid $5 an hour overseas, that's not a gamble I'm willing to take. Paid $5 an hour overseas, that's not a gamble I'm willing to take.

Eric Eden 25:38

I think it makes a lot of sense that having a personal brand is critical to not only scaling but then maintaining your success. I think a lot of people think it's nice to have and they're like I'll do it later, when I get over 10 million and when I have more time. But then you'll never have time. And even a lot of executives that aren't necessarily the founder that work at a company, they just put it off. They don't want to make an investment in time, effort or any money to do it, and then when they have a gap in their career, they're like oh, I should have done it, and that's a wrong time to start when you're in between. So the best time to start is probably a number of years ago, but there's never better time to start than now, is what I would like to say.

Brian Smith 26:25

I say the same thing all the time. I tell people you have to think about it like a savings account, right? Just like you said, the best time to start it was probably five or 10 years ago. The second best time is now. The worst time is tomorrow, and so the other thing I'll add there, too, is it's a lot like going to the gym. You got to put the reps in. The more you do it, the better you get, and people are especially early on. They're worried about quality. They'll spend a ton of time figuring out what to post, the message and so forth. But quality is the result of quantity. So get out there and do it, and the more you do it, the more you're going to dial in and figure out what works. But you just got to get started. You have to start. If you're listening to this right now and you're not building your personal brand, go start today. Do not wait.

Eric Eden 27:16

And what do you think the number one thing when people jump in and they're ready to do it, what is the number one thing that people can do to be successful in building their personal brand? Be personal.

Mastering Engaging Content Creation

Brian Smith 27:29

Like actually speak the way you speak. Use it as a way for people to get to know you. Remember the way I talk about LinkedIn is. It is the modern networking event. So if you think about a networking event, who are the people that have everyone crowded around? They're the ones telling the best stories engaging. They're not the ones that are saying, hi, I'm the founder of this agency, these are the services that I offer, and so forth. Those are the ones that end up standing over against the wall waiting for someone to come up and talk to them. So be personable, do like I did Go hang out with fishermen, learn how to tell a good story and get out there and remember that it's about being engaging. You can write the most valuable post in the world, but if you don't have an engaging hook, it's still a crappy post. It's your job. If you have something to share, work on making it interesting, because whether that's online or in person, it's the exact same. People will lose interest if you're not interesting.

Eric Eden 28:32

Any final thoughts that you want to share? That I didn't ask.

Brian Smith 28:37

I'll follow up on that and say don't be boring and live an interesting life. It makes all this a lot more a lot easier.

Eric Eden 28:46

I agree with that a thousand percent. I'm going to link to your website and your LinkedIn in the show notes so people can easily get there and reach out if they want to connect with you and learn more about what you and your awesome team are doing. Really appreciate you being on the show today. Thank you.

Brian Smith 29:02

Awesome. Thank you, eric, I appreciate it.