Robby: Welcome to episode two and our series on The Seven Deadly Dangers of Building a Personal Brand.
Last episode, we looked at danger number one, and we saw: personal brands have very little accountability.
They have very little accountability.
So go back and check out that episode.
That's episode number 56, if you have not already.
And today we're going to jump into danger number two.
Originally, I thought maybe I would put two of these per episode.
I think I want to keep it one danger per episode, because I want to keep these short so that you and I can listen to them and not have to worry about them being too long to listen to.
And number two, I want to give us some questions to think about each time.
Just help us maybe pause and reflect a little bit.
If this is the only time we spend thinking about some of these aspects of what's at stake when we go build a personal brand, then at least let's spend these minutes well.
Lots of attention out there is given to all of the wonderful things that come with building and having and growing a personal brand business.
If you're a coach, a creator, a consultant, a freelancer, a solopreneur, when you have your own brand and business, there are lots and lots of benefits.
That's usually where the spotlight gets shined.
It's dangled out there like a carrot, we said last time.
And a lot of that is true.
All we're saying in this series is least asked the question, is that the whole truth?
You'll hear most of the attention go to how great it is.
You'll hear some attention given to the challenges that come with building a personal brand business.
I don't think we hear any talk that I'm aware of about some of just the inherent dangers of building a personal brand.
So that's where we are.
And that brings us to danger number two.
Danger number two is that personal brands play on a dangerous field and that field is the internet.
Personal brands play on a dangerous field in that field is the internet.
Now we know that what we think of as a personal brand business, it really could not exist the way that it exists right now, currently before the internet.
That would just be impossible.
Personal brands--being a coach, creator, consultant, freelancer, solopreneur, speaker-- and conducting business online, like personal brands do, obviously that could not happen the way that it works right now before the internet.
Now that's not news to you, but let's think about that for a second.
That connection between a personal brand business and the internet.
I would like to suggest that they are so entwined that what is good about one is often good about the other.
What is a strength of one is often the strength of another.
But the flip side of that is true.
Personal brand businesses and the internet are so entwined that also what is bad or what is a weakness about one is likely going to be bad or a weakness about the other.
So let's take a few minutes just to think about both the good and the bad, the strengths and the weaknesses of the internet.
And then ask ourselves if a personal brand is so entwined with the internet, might there be some of the same flaws concerns, issues that I should be aware of as I attempt to build, to grow a personal brand.
So I just want to talk about three.
I'm sure there's lots that we could talk about strengths and weaknesses of the internet, but we're going to focus on three for the sake of this episode.
Number one, the internet is fast.
The internet is fast.
That is one of the strengths, you can get something out there very, very quickly.
You literally just hit publish.
And in a matter of seconds there it is.
Available to anyone around the world who has internet access.
So that is a major strength of the internet.
It, it it's fast.
It is way faster than doing business 40 years ago before the internet.
If you had a new product or service 40 years ago to get word out, usually that involved print ads and copywriters you, you know, the routine.
Now, literally anyone from their living room can just fling it out there on the internet.
It's really, really fast.
We all also know that anything that goes really, really fast, can also be a weakness.
It can be a good thing.
That speed can also be a bad thing.
Consider the fact that with the internet, when you start a personal brand business, now you do that on the internet.
The internet is fast.
That also means there's the potential for your personal brand business to grow at the pace or the speed of that very, very fast internet.
So personal brand businesses, because they're connected to the internet, have the capacity to grow really fast.
But if you rewind the clock before the internet and you wanted to start your own business 40 years ago, things would not have moved that quickly.
What that means is over time, it would have perhaps, perhaps it takes you 20 years to build the kind of business before the internet that you could build in two years or five years.
Now, let's keep the math simple.
Let's assume what it took you 20 years to do before the internet.
Perhaps you could do that as quick as five, probably even quicker.
So that means that the same time period before the internet.
That 20 year period would have been 20 years of you growing and developing as a business leader, learning business skills, along the way, marketing skills, along the way, over that 20 year period as your business would slowly grow at a regular pace.
The skills that you needed to gain or acquire would grow at the same pace.
Your ability to understand how to market a business--how to market a business that's twice the size it was at year 10 than it was at year one--you would learn that at year 10, not like at month 10.
The leadership skills you would develop over a 20 year career of building your own business, now that gets compressed into such a short time.
Basically any and all of the lessons that you would have learned building a business slowly over 20 years, you're racing past much of that when you build a personal brand business, because it's built on the internet and the internet is fast!
While that is at times fantastic.
It has some dangers, some weaknesses, some things we just need to be aware of.
Now it would be easy to think, "Well, I'm about to start a personal brand business, or I just started one, three years ago."
However, for the kind of subject matter of my personal brand business, I've been doing that for 10 years or five years or 15 years or 20 years.
So that doesn't really applied to me because I've got 10 years experience in the subject matter.
And that's true.
I just want to remind us that being a subject matter expert or having 10 years of experience in a subject matter, let's say in a corporate job, in a corporate setting you did this for 10 years.
You've got subject matter expertise and experience.
That is not necessarily the same thing as running a personal brand business around that subject matter.
We're not talking simply about the subject matter.
Running a personal brand business means you're in charge of everything, not just being a subject matter expert.
But you're in charge of financing, bookkeeping, sales, the whole nine yards.
You're running a business.
You're not just a part of a much larger business.
So that's one of the strengths and weaknesses of the internet that we need to consider because personal brands are so entwined with the internet that what's good or bad about one is likely good or bad about the other.
So part one, it's fast.
And sometimes fast can be dangerous.
The second thing I want to mention is the internet is not only fast, but it goes far.
In other words, the reach you can have because of the internet we know is massive.
It's literally global.
It's literally worldwide.
I was thinking about this point and if you took a sample of my last two months and who I have done business with as part of my personal brand, it would spread across several countries.
I I'm literally just thinking off the top of my head.
It would include Romania and Greece, several countries in Africa.
It would include Canada, several folks across all different states across the United States of America.
That's just in the last two months.
Those are people I have actually done business with.
That's not podcast listeners in another country.
That's clients or customers I've worked with talk to in some sort of a business context, coaching sessions, whatever that may be.
So the internet helps me reach very, very far.
That is a major strength.
It also can be a weakness.
In that it, it's easy for me to gather a crowd that if I was a local business 40 years ago before the internet, I would have to work harder to earn that audience than I have to work now.
So if I wanted to have kind of a extra local reach 40 years ago,- -a lot more work than it does now.
Now I can literally schedule a zoom call and people, as long as I'm moderately aware of my time zone, compared to the time zones around the world of where I would expect or want people to be engaging on the zoom call from, they can do it from anywhere they want.
So that's a major strength.
It's also a weakness that you're responsible now.
If you're pulling people from across the globe, that's great.
Cause we feel good about that.
We pat ourselves on the back, look at me, I've got, more people, I've got a bigger audience or a bigger client base or a bigger customer base than I used to have.
I'm drawing from all over the place.
Well, there's a lot more demands on that.
I don't know nearly as much about culture, how customers work, halfway across the world as I do in my own context, because I'm not over there.
So I've got to be aware of that.
That's a weakness where if I'm coaching or talking to someone who's separated by thousands of miles in a different country in a different context, different primary language, different cultural settings...
I've got to be aware of all the assumptions I'm bringing about.
Things must work.
They're exactly like they work in my part of the United States.
The way consumers act here, I'm sure that's the same way they act out there.
The way I would do it here.
I'm just going to fling it out there and assume that's the way you do it.
There.
That is a strength that I can connect with all those people.
But it's also a weakness.
I need to be aware that.
I'm not just assuming what's true here is what's true there.
So that puts a whole nother demand on me to think throug h, what information am I passing along?
What sort of coaching?
What sort of consulting?
What sort of advice?
What sort of products.
What am I putting out there?
What am I suggesting?
What am I assuming?
And am I really serving my clients that might not be in the exact same context.
Because it's much easier for me to just give a formula that I assume or presume is true universally than it is for me to take the time to step back and think...
"What's the principle beneath this that probably would be true beyond just my context of culture?"
That's a lot of work.
I don't know if you've ever thought about that or tried to do that.
That's a lot of work.
So the internet is fast.
Sometimes it can be too fast.
And because our personal brands are so entwined with the internet, sometimes that moves us along too fast and that can be dangerous.
It also is far reaching, so it's fast and it's far reaching.
We just need to be aware of that because it's easy for us to get greedy, to over grab to overreach and not think through the fact that Hmm, not everyone I'm reaching is in the exact same context I am.
And then the last one--the internet is fast, the internet is far reaching...
You already know this.
The internet is fake.
It can be fake.
It's a great place to be fake.
If you were in the United States, you heard a lot about that over the last two presidential elections.
But here is the reality.
The internet primarily only sees what you speak.
It only sees the words you put on your website, the captions you write on your social media.
It predominantly only sees how you speak.
And that's a strength in that.
You can declutter, you can get all the other stuff out of the way.
It reminds me maybe a little bit of the music competition show that my family, we enjoy.
Honestly, we enjoy The Voice.
The whole setup of The Voice and that reality music TV show is that when a singer or artist comes on stage, the three judges cannot see them.
They have their back turns.
So they're only evaluating the talent based on the sound of the voice.
Not how they look, not how old, not how young.
All of that criteria gets shelved because they can't see it.
So they're only judging based on and the quality of the voice.
That's a strength of the internet.
If I'm not the one right looking, I don't fit the perfect profile for whatever it is.
The internet is primarily about what you speak.
So as long as you say it the right way, it can remove those other distractions that your dream client or dream customer might have to overcome...
kind of like with that voice analogy.
That's a strength.
The problem is that means it's also really easy to be fake because people predominantly on the internet only see what you speak.
So the weakness is they don't really get to see how you lead.
They don't really get to know how you've structured things behind the scenes.
They don't really know how you spend, how you invest.
There's all these things they don't get to see because all of the, all that they see usually online.
The internet is about seeing what you speak, not actually how things play out in real life.
Several years back my two older kids at the time were probably, my daughter was probably fourth or fifth grade and my middle son then as a couple of grades beneath her.
So let's say he's like a third grader or fourth grader.
I was out mowing the front yard.
Now, our house sits on top of a hill on our street.
So our driveway is a hill that slopes down to the street.
And then once you get to the street, literally on either side of my yard, if you come out of my driveway and go left, or you come out of my driveway and go, right, not only is the driveway slope down to the street, but the street going both directions, we're literally at the top of the hill.
Come out of my driveway go left or right.
It's probably close to a 200 yard hill down to the bottom of the hill, either side.
So I'm mowing the front yard.
My fifth grade daughter and third grade son are out playing in the driveway.
And they have rediscovered this old Little Tikes plastic car that we had probably when they were like four.
And for some reason I just haven't thrown it away yet.
So it's in the backyard.
They find it.
Wipe it off for them.
Cause it's just been sitting in the yard for years.
It's all faded, right?
It was like red with the yellow top and half those colors are faded away.
Somehow my daughter can barely squeeze in there, flinstone style.
Yes, I just dated myself.
So she somehow squeezed in there.
And then my son is back behind her pushing her on the driveway.
And they're just going in little circles.
He's pushing her, she's laughing, he's laughing.
They're just going in a little circles.
No big deal.
The problem is at one point when my son pushes her, she doesn't quite make the turn on the driveway, the sloped driveway.
Now all of a sudden, her Little Tykes car, thanks to gravity, is now headed down the driveway that sloped towards the street.
And it doesn't take long for her to pick up some initial speed.
And before I realized what's happening because I'm mowing, I look up and she is in the little tykes car.
She is now left the driveway already going quite fast.
And she's now literally on the street headed down that 200 something yard slope down to the bottom of our street, which is a fairly busy stop sign.
If she were to even somehow make it that way.
So I remember absolute panic setting in, so I immediately let go of the lawnmower and I take off full sprint as much as I could as a middle-aged dude, I take off after her.
Thankfully adrenaline kicks in.
Somehow I catch her.
She was already moving fast.
I don't know all of the physics of how fast she w what speed would she have gotten to had I not caught her, where I caught her.
Cause she was already moving.
I'm guessing that little tykes car would have probably hit 15 to 20 plus miles an hour.
That's how steep and long the hill is.
And a tiny plastic, Little Tykes car with.
Fifth-grader inside of it.
And the problem was she didn't have shoes on.
She was barefoot, so she couldn't put her feet down to stop this thing because it would literally on a street, you can imagine...
The point of that story is that in some ways that's why running a personal brand is dangerous.
Because personal brands play on a dangerous field and that field is the internet.
The internet that is great at moving really, really fast giving a really, really far away.
And unfortunately at times, allowing you to be fake.
But in the same way, why is my daughter's careening down the hill in a car that's not really meant for that.
And a little Tikes plastic toy car.
She's going at breakneck speed.
That's what draws many of us to personal brands with the internet.
Plus the internet.
It's like a match made in heaven.
I can get somewhere really, really fast.
But moving at breakneck speed when you're not equipped for it, that is really, really dangerous.
So that's danger number two--deadly danger number two of building a personal brand is that personal brands play on a very powerful, but it can be dangerous field.
And that field is the internet.
Here's some questions I want to leave you with that I want you to think about and chew on until our next episode.
So if you're building a personal brand, Either.
If you're thinking about starting one again, you've just started one you're in the starter phase, maybe you're in the growing phase.
Maybe you're well into it.
This, and you're in this scaling phase, regardless of where you are.
If you're building a personal brand and you find yourself sometimes jealous at the faster than you growth of another personal brand.
Have you ever found yourself?
Just sometimes jealous that, Hey, so-and-so's moving faster than me in their personal brand business.
Or maybe you found yourself wanting growth and success to clip by at a much faster pace.
Or maybe you find that sometimes you're impatient.
Sometimes you find yourself struggling to wait for things to happen.
If you have an overall lack of patients connected to your personal brand in business, perhaps we need to stop and ask ourselves, am I overvaluing speed?
Because personal brands are built on something really, really fast.
That's the internet.
Am I overvaluing speed and undervaluing time?
That in a different day, in a different era, this would be something I would be looking to build over several decades.
And I would learn and grow in line with my business at that same pace.
So am I overvaluing speed and undervaluing time in the development, not only of my personal brand business, but who I need to be in order to run a healthy, personal brand business?
So there is deadly danger number two.
I hope this series is getting you at least thinking a little bit about the full aspect of what it looks like and what's at stake when we want to go build a personal brand business.
I wanted to let you know that I'm going to be at the podcast movement conference in Nashville.
That's the first week of August.
That's next week from the time that this is getting recorded and released.
So if you're listening and you're going to be in Nashville the first week of August, certainly if you're going to be at the podcast movement conference, then DM me.
Reach out.
I would love to connect.
I'd love to have a chance to meet and say hi and just visit.
So reach out if you're going to be in Nashville the first week of August.
By all means hit me up DM me on Instagram.
I also wanted to tell you about a new resource that will be available on my website.
It is the Seven Simple Secrets Behind Personal Brand Websites that Get Results.
I'd love for you to go grab that free resource.
You can just go to Robbyf.com.
It will be there on the home page.
Just scroll down.
You should see it.
The seven simple secrets behind personal brand websites that get results.
I really did condense 20 years of web design.
It's crazy to think about 20 years, 20 years ago, I built my first website.
I condensed that down.
It's really the shortcut to making an unmistakably clear, attractive and strategic first impression with your personal brand website.
So go grab that resource.
If you enjoyed this episode, I would love for you to go leave a rating or review on apple podcast.
It is the best way to get the word out and to help other people discover this podcast.
So that would mean a lot.
Just go to the apple podcast page.
Put a link to that in the show notes.
If you scroll down, you'll see a spot where you can leave the star rating, or you can leave a review.
If you do that, leave your name and your website, and I'll give you a shout out on the podcast.
And until next time go and build a life giving brand.