Personal Branding Is A Cheatcode For Business Owners. Here’s Why…

What’s up, all you beautiful people? Welcome back to the podcast. Okay, so the number one issue, the number one thing, the number one roadblock, obstacle, whatever you want to call it, that we all have to get over as entrepreneurs, if we want to be successful, is we have to overcome obscurity. We need to know, we need to make people aware that we exist. Because if we don’t have any butts in the pews, we cannot save souls, right? As David Ogilvy said, we cannot save souls in an empty church. And I don’t care who you are, what kind of business you have, who you serve, if they don’t know you exist, you can’t help them. And this point was driven home for me like a punch in the face back in 2019 when we launched Invictus Capital. So up to this point, I had built a number of businesses. Each had gotten to seven figures, with the exception of one.

That one imploded and went absolutely horrible. And it was very embarrassing. I don’t want to talk about. No, I. Just kidding. I’ve done podcasts on that one, but that’s not the point of today’s topic. But I had a number of businesses that were very successful. We exited those.
Now, the mistake that I made with those businesses is that when we grew them, we grew them in such a way that the business itself was front facing, not me or my partners as the owners of the business. And so what that meant is, when I sold my shares of those businesses, nobody knew who I was. I had no brand reputation. I hadn’t been talking about my journey online. I hadn’t been sharing it with other people. I had very intentionally been building these businesses in a way that the business was front facing. And so what that meant was when I then pivoted to go and build the next business, it was as though I was starting from square one. Now, I had the knowledge that I had acquired from the previous ventures, and I had capital from those previous ventures, but I didn’t have notoriety.
I didn’t have reputation. I didn’t have reach. And the truth is that resources such as knowledge and capital are great for all sorts of reasons. But if you don’t have anybody to get your knowledge or your capital in front of, then it doesn’t do you any good. So I had the same problem, right? I had to take the capital that I had acquired, I had to spend it on marketing to get the next business up and going, to get that flywheel going. And I did that a couple of times before I learned my lesson. In 2019, when we launched Invictus Capital, this was around the time that I was stepping out of the day to day activities of escape climbing, I realized I had made a fundamental mistake with Invictus. We were launching this thing from square one, from ground zero.
Nobody knew that I had been building these other businesses, and I had this reputation, right? I didn’t have that. And so as we started building Invictus, my partner and I, we sat down and we were very intentional about building our personal brands in such a way that the personal brand would drive attention towards the different businesses that we have in our hold company. But this way, the compounding effect of investing into our own reach and reputation can expand further. So if I sell invictus or if I go start another business, people know who I am. I have reach and reputation that I can then deploy against that new opportunity. So instead of using the capital to go and try and pay advertising and get eyeballs onto the new thing that I’m working on, if I’m spending time and energy just overcoming obscurity with my own personal content, then when I have that opportunity in the future, I can just shift people’s attention over to that. Okay, so that’s the rationale why I think every entrepreneur, every business owner should be building a personal brand. And it’s one of the reasons that one of the techniques that I teach for growing both your business, but also growing as an entrepreneur and your ability to communicate, your ability to do uncomfortable things, is that you need to be putting out daily content, just sharing your story with the world.
Even if your business doesn’t really lend itself to your personal story, helping it grow doesn’t really matter. You still should be doing this. Now, the question that I get very often from new entrepreneurs that are like, okay, I want to use social media. I understand that organic content is a powerful way to drive attention to what I’m doing, but how do I do that from a very technical perspective? And one of the questions that I got this morning from somebody was, should I have a personal Instagram account or a professional Instagram account? And her question was, really around, okay, well, my business doesn’t really have anything to do with my personal life. I’m really into fitness, my kids, and all this other stuff. Should I keep those separate? And, you know, that way the people that are coming to my personal, they’re coming just for me, and they’re coming to the business for the other. So this is a question that you’ve probably struggled with as an entrepreneur. You’re like, do I use the business account or do I use my personal account? The account.
Here’s the answer. Is that it’s all you. It’s all you at the end of the day. Like, people do business with people. So until you’re doing $100 million a year in top line revenue, like, nobody’s really going and searching for your business. Case in point, if you run, as is the case with this woman that approached me this morning, she runs a copywriting agency. Nobody is on Instagram scrolling copywriting agencies. They’re not looking for that.
They’re not looking to follow copywriting agencies. Now, they might be interested in how to use copywriting to, you know, grow their business, make more money, and they might subscribe to different copywriting accounts, but that is probably an individual who they like, who they know, who they trust, and who’s that person is sharing their story. They’re sharing these lessons in a way that the person resonates with and wants to apply. So do not split the two, first of all, because what will end up happening is you will dilute your focus. You, it’s already hard enough to show up every single day and create content for one account, to try and do it for multiple accounts. You’re just, you’re signing yourself up for a recipe for disaster. So bring it all into the same account. Use your own personal name, and then make it clear what your businesses do in the bio or in the description.
But make it your account. Make it about you in your life as the entrepreneur, the founder, and what you do. And the thing, the trick to making this work is to always be thinking about how is the content that I’m creating today valuable for my target audience? And so you can share videos with your kids or the vacation that you took, but only if you can tie that back to what you do and how it can serve the audience. Now, if that is, hey, you know, it’s important to, you know, I’m all about with my copywriting, helping you make more money in your business so that you have more time, freedom, to be able to go on vacation with your family, with your friends, and, like, have these moments, these memories, right? So you could tie it in that way. But that’s the important key here, is that you’re not just being willy nilly and showing pictures of your dinner, right? Like, without context, you need to explain and give context around why you’re sharing the thing that makes it valuable for the audience. So that’s the long, super long answer. Just have a personal account. Now, you can use a professional account or a business account on LinkedIn or on Instagram, whatever, doesn’t matter.

But use it as though you are the business. You are the thing that’s trying to attract attention to you. You are the compounding vehicle. And then you have all these other ancillary things that they can go and explore and learn more about. So that’s where your calls to action come in. But we’ll talk about that at another point, and that’s gonna do it for me here, guys. We’ll catch you in the next episode. Stay hype, folks.

My friends.