79 CAS Mktg: Personal Brand vs Business Brand

🚀 Personal vs. Business Brand: Where Should You Focus?

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📢 Should you focus on building a personal brand or a business brand? Many CAS firm owners struggle with balancing both. In this episode, we break down:
✔️ The role of personal branding in growing your firm
✔️ Why your business brand must stand on its own
✔️ How to balance content creation while running a firm
✔️ Practical steps to build brand equity & attract clients

⏱️ Chapters
00:00 - Introduction: Balancing Content & Running a CAS Firm
00:20 - Personal Brand vs. Business Brand: Where Should You Focus?
00:44 - How a Strong Personal Brand Helps Grow Your Business
01:21 - Why Your Business Brand Must Eventually Stand on Its Own
02:11 - Building Trust & Brand Equity Beyond the Founder
03:06 - How Personal & Business Brands Differ in Strategy
04:30 - Why Brand Independence Matters for Scaling & Selling Your Firm
05:11 - How to Make Time for Content Creation as a Busy Firm Owner
06:21 - The Role of LinkedIn, Podcasts, & SEO in Business Branding
07:30 - Batch Processing Content for Maximum Efficiency
08:44 - Final Thoughts: How to Start Building Your Brand in 2025

✅ Key Takeaways:
✔️ Early-stage firms rely on personal branding—clients trust the founder first.
✔️ A business brand must stand independently for long-term growth & scalability.
✔️ Content creation is key for marketing—but it must be systematized.
✔️ Pick two content channels & commit to one high-impact post per week.
✔️ Branding momentum comes from consistency, not just likes & views.

📢 Which do you prioritize more: your personal brand or business brand? Comment below!

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Full Send | Accounting & Data

LinkedIn: Roman Villard, CPA
X: @FullSendCPA
YouTube: Full Send - Accounting & Data
Data Podcast: Data Fuel

Transcript

my day job consists of running a seven figure CAS practice. And that's not easy when you're trying to manage your time. You may notice I didn't ship any new episodes last week because my priorities shifted and I wasn't able to record. And it made me think, How do you prioritize content creation through the lens of growing your business?

But then also, how do you triage personal brand versus business brand? There's a lot of strategies on how to accomplish these things really well. And personally, I'm torn in a lot of directions on that. And I see the same thing happen with other early stage firm owners trying to develop their business brand while also developing a personal brand alongside of it.

So at what point do those things need to

Diverge in order to create a business brand that can be sustainable without the presence of the founder.

And also how do you prioritize how and when you lean into content creation? What are the avenues to do that? And why is it so important for your firm?

So as we think about starting a firm, getting it off the ground, going to market, trying to bring in new clients, really that firm, the persona, the brand, everything around that firm is related to you. And that's your personal brand, but it is tied synonymously with your business brand when you start out of the gates.

And so what's great about that is that a strong personal brand can really help to grow the early stages of your business because the trust by nature of the content that you're putting out there is putting you that trust is granted to the brand because of what you've done for yourself. That said, that thought leadership, that those relationships that occur, that that human connection that comes from you and your personal brand is not independent of your business.

So the goal over time is to try to create some independence there that that The trust by nature of you creating that originally moves from you as a, as an individual to the business, there's trust in the name, there's trust in the service, there's trust in the team behind the brand.

Now, at the end of the day, people buy from people. And so ideally you have multiple personas, multiple individuals within. Your brand, your firm that create more of that trusting relationship that goes beyond that of just the founder. However, what we're trying to do with the brand of the business is to create a system, create a framework for how and why you share what you share to create that brand.

Now, ultimately, what we're trying to do on the business brand side of things is to establish trust. So what we want to do on the business brand is say, how can we take this unknown firm, this unknown name, whatever that is and associate it with something that is positive, something that is good, something that somebody can create parallel in their minds between to help them associate your brand with either a quality service, a positive outcome, something desirable to your brand.

To that end target market. Now your personal brand is going to be very different in that it's focused more on thought leadership, more on individual personality and connectivity to your audience. So those things diverge because with the Business brand, we really do want to focus more on the case studies, the outcomes, the blogs, the content that helps drive target market acquisition.

And so to the extent that you can actually create brand association with some positive outcome for your target market, you're going to start to develop that trust in the brand that you create on the business side. However, it's important to note those things will diverge over time, personal brand and business brand.

Now, why is this so important as you scale your firm? And this is particular for the folks that want to scale their firm in order to get to 10, 20, 50, 100, 200, 500 employees. The importance of, of your brand, as you relate to scaling your firm and ultimately creating opportunity for your firm is that The brand must have recognizable value independent of the founder. And that is going to be what's driving enterprise value for the firm. To the extent that the firm is so intrinsically tied to the initial founder, it's going to be far more difficult to realize that value in the market if you were to go to market to sell, to acquire, to merge, what have you.

And so it's really important to create distancing between those things.

so we've established that there needs to be divergent between your personal brand and your business brand. We realized that creating brand equity in the business is tremendously important as you move forward and scale your practice towards an eventual culmination and perhaps an exit or a sale, something like that.

Now, how do we actually, at the very beginning of the firm, start to do that, create time for it, and then create a system that can help scale that? I don't have this nailed down perfectly. I'd be lying if I said I did. However, I've established a couple of key practices in my day to day work that allows me to dive into things like this.

So, CAS Minute, this podcast, really has nothing to do with my business brand. This isn't helping me generate leads. And so a lot of people are like, well, what, why do it? For me, it's a personal passion thing. I thoroughly enjoy helping other people grow their firms in a far more equitable, sustainable manner.

That's. Divergent from what we've seen in firms in the past. So it brings me personally a lot of value. And I hope that by nature of me spending time doing this, it is bringing others value. So there is a personal brand component to this podcast alone that we're listening to right now. Now, when I look across the other streams that I spend my time in from a content perspective, the other personal initiatives are really heavily driven by LinkedIn.

I post nearly every single day on LinkedIn in order to continue to create positive associations with my personal brand and a voice in an industry, and then by nature of posting every day, creating a positive association with the business brand that is Full Send. Now, on the full send side of things, the content creation is critically important for creating awareness of who we are and what we do in the market.

And so there are distinct rhythms that I have on that side, whether it's related to podcasting on the data science side, podcasting on the CFO front that then turns into videos for YouTube, blogs for the website, and or creating website updates and hooks and messages that are evolving over time to try to create more brand association with positive outcomes.

And so when I think about business brand creation, we've got blogs, newsletters, podcasts, and some degree of videos that go alongside of all of those things. For me, it's really important to ensure that there is a really close tie between all of those things. Exactly. Activities, meaning if I post a podcast, I want there to be an associated element on my website that can tie back to the podcast.

Same thing goes for video. Those should link back and forth to help boost your SEO, to boost your credibility and trustworthiness on Google, and then just to create more opportunities for folks to engage with your content. Now, by nature of me, nearly single handedly doing this for the firm and for myself, there's only a limited amount of time to be able to allocate to these things.

And so, I like to batch process all of the content in one, maybe one and a half days. Meaning, I spend most Mondays doing this. From 8 a. m. to noon, focusing on content. That's content creation, content ideation, content posting. I will then edit and then batch post those content pieces across the next week, maybe two weeks, depending on how that content flows together.

I would be remiss to say that not everything I do is going to be scheduled and posted and done to that effect. Because there are some Monday mornings that really require my time and effort on something else in the business. Because ultimately, my primary responsibility is to grow a firm, not to create content.

That's not how I make money. That said, uh, I will post something that is completely off the top of my head, if I feel like, hey, maybe somebody else could get value from this, or maybe it's a question that somebody else has, or maybe I need help trying to figure out a solution to a problem that I'm having.

And so, it's not all This really systematized driven process. However, I will say that the batch processing that I do on Mondays is tremendously helpful for a workflow. It helps me prioritize the time that I have for the rest of the week and not constantly be thinking about what I need to be doing next on the content creation front.

Now, if you want to get started in this, if you want to start looking at how do I start to not only create a personal brand or create a business brand and, or diverge those two, you really need to start. Start somewhere, right? I think it's always easiest to start on the personal brand side of things because it's your own ideas and thoughts and opinions.

And so by nature of them being your own, you can own those far more easily. You can inject more personality into them. And so I think by leaning into your personal brand, you can then start to shift that personal brand into a business brand if those things are tied intrinsically. And because, for most early stage CAS practices, they are big by nature of you starting, uh, getting a few clients, and then you effectively becoming an extension of the brand.

I would recommend focusing on two specific content formats for you to lean into. It could be simple text posting on LinkedIn, or it could be a podcast version of audio posting to get your thoughts out there. So let's pick two content verticals. That could be short form Twitter. It could be a longer form on LinkedIn.

It could be more image driven on Instagram. It could be more audio on podcasts. That said, pick two. And then once we, once we pick two verticals to start focusing on, just commit to posting like one high ROI content piece per week. So maybe that, that high ROI activity per week for you is creating some type of educational post for your target market, and that can be through you or through the business brand.

But if you can commit to posting one high ROI activity per week, you will start to see momentum. And. Trust me, it is not the number of likes, or the number of impressions that is momentum. It is seeing content engaged over time that really creates the momentum for your brand. And you're not going to get that in your first post. You're not going to get that in your third post. This requires consistency. But to the extent that you can commit to just doing one thing per week across two different mediums, you can create a really good rhythm for your brand.

For starting to create a personal brand or a business brand over the course of 2025. And so I love this topic. I love leaning into it. I love spending time here, but quite frankly, it's not my number one priority. And this is something that I think a lot of firm owners struggle with. So we'll continue the, topic of conversation on this and lean more into how can we build a better brand to create a more profitable, sustainable and growing business in 2025 till next