3 vital benefits of personal branding
If you were a fan of Mad Men, you’ll recall that for many years Don Draper worked without a contract and therefore without a non-compete agreement. This gave Draper enormous bargaining power at crucial times.
It’s a fact of business life for founders and virtually every professional that they work hard to create a company but when they leave, most of what they have created stays with the company – the accounts, the good will, the name, and more.
Your personal brand is portable
However, if you invest some of your time in creating a personal brand, you’re rewarded with something you can take with you – and that’s the first of our three benefits of personal branding.
Don’t walk out the door with just a stapler and box of outdated business cards. When you move on to your next project or position, take your well-established personal brand with you. Remember the Rolodex? A personal brand created and cared for in the social media cloud is a critical Internet-age extension of the Rolodex. Although it often doesn’t fully substitute for having people’s addresses and phone numbers, it does greatly enhance that information.
Further, if you use LinkedIn to create a major component of your personal brand, you not only enjoy “virtual” benefits, you get the “hard” benefits as well, such as being able to phone and email prospects.
It’s about people who need people
As much as we talk about “building” a company, that’s not really what we’re usually doing. We’re really building an organization of people who are trained, equipped, and positioned to do business with other people.
Another of the major benefits of personal branding is in its ability to establish you as the “go-to” person in your field. As your personal brand gains strength, the name of the company you own or work for becomes less important.
I know a gentleman who was an inventor all through his adult life. He’s retired now, but before he retired he developed devices that could precisely locate leaks in pipes or faults in wires that were buried underground. Professionals in this industry called him the “father of underground location.”
That was personal branding before the term entered everyday usage. As you can imagine, that “brand” opened a lot of doors for him over the years.
To thine own self be true
One of the subtle benefits of personal branding has nothing to do with what other people think of you – it has everything to do with what you think about yourself!
When you work hard and consistently over an extended period of time to establish your personal brand, you’ll find that it becomes an attribute you strive to protect. For many of us, personal accountability can be a challenge. It’s not that we don’t care about ourselves, it’s just that we tend to get distracted.
When you have invested heavily in your personal brand, you’ll discover that it helps guide and motivate you in all the right ways.
You’ll start to protect your brand with the same care as Coca-Cola guards its recipe!