There’s a thread going around in small business about something called personal branding, and while it has merit and can certainly give some people a leg up on the competition, please don’t confuse personal branding with building a business.
Again, when a person creates a brand that allows them to stand out, they may be able to charge more for their services or get higher profile gigs, but what they’ve created is a job. (In some cases that’s the grand payoff of a personal brand, a better job.)
Now, we are not against personal branding, it may offer some people that ability to create the best job going, but a business is an asset, something that gets more valuable over time, and here’s the biggie, it can be sold. It is very difficult to sell a personal brand. Some of the biggest personal brands you could name on twitter, right now, would be worth very little without the person behind the avatar.
It’s
really not a right way or wrong way. It’s a
strategic choice. Know the consequences of the
choice. The funny thing is, it’s actually easier
to build a personal brand online than it is to
build a business brand and that’s where some
people get tripped up. It’s a balancing act that
must be intentionally orchestrated and gradually
implemented.
Here’s what I mean. To get a business started,
you may find it much easier to just be you,
provide great service and let people remark all
over town how you’re the next big thing. But, at
some point, you have to take yourself out of the
equation and let the idea of what you’ve started
be grown into a brand, if, in fact, you want
this business you created to be worth more than
your book of business this month.
The first step may be the name of your business – Mr. Smith changed Ron Smith Communications to Interactive Marketing Corp eight years ago and went from a guy in New Jersey slinging marketing to small startups with limited or no budgets to a company with multiple national corporate contracts, some with fortune 500 companies, but the change started with the name. The more Interactive Marketing is a brand and less Ron Smith, the more valuable it becomes to the secret list of companies interested in acquiring it.
Obviously, creating a business or a brand is not simply a matter of picking a good name and packaging it; but it does need to originate from the idea that a business is likely worthless unless it can operate without the owner or the personal brand of the founder.