Episode 5: Using your reputation and personal brand to build your business (transcript)

What’s up y’all. Welcome to The Shontavia Show where my goal is to help you start a business based on your life’s vision. This ain’t gonna be your daddy’s business advice. I’m laser focused on entrepreneurship in the 21st century, vision and breaking the traditional mold. If you can get with that, you can get with me. Be sure to visit shontavia.com for more episodes, blog posts, and other content. Thank you for listening.

The show starts now.

Hey everybody, this is Shontavia. Welcome back to another episode of The Shontavia Show, where I want to help you start a business based on the vision for your life. Today’s episode is all about personal branding and using a personal brand to build a business and to support a business.

I want to start with a story about me. When I first began teaching law in the law school setting, I struggled a lot with my professional identity.

When I was growing up. I actually didn’t know anybody who really liked their job. I knew everybody had a job, nobody really liked their job. The goal was to go make whatever money you needed to make and go home. And so that’s what I did.

I knew I was smart. I knew that I had dreams. I did not think work was the place where dreams were made, or that I could have like a life and work that they’ve worked together and, and supported the things I’ve wanted to do personally and professionally together.

I thought those things had to be separate. I knew I wanted more, even though I was teaching and doing something that a lot of people aspire toward, but I didn’t really know how to take all of that and turn it into something. I don’t know what I thought. I thought maybe, I dunno, my dreams would fall out of the sky or something.

But I had all these unanswered questions. I didn’t know what it really meant to be successful. I knew I wanted to be successful. I thought I really wanted to be very, very rich. I didn’t know how to connect any of these dots together.

But around that time I had a coworker who,uhis name, his name is Tony, that is his real first name. And he had been building a brand around his expertise. Tony is one of the smartest people I’ve ever met on the planet. He has all of these amazing academic experiences, but also he’s had a ton of real world experiences.

He was a prosecutor in Iraq during the Iraq war. He is a historian. He studied American presidents, he’s written books about American presidents and politics. He became a law professor a couple of years before the 2016 election. So this was like a perfect time for a person with that expertise in the United States. So many things got turned on their heads with the American 2016 presidential elections.

So he was writing for Politico and Newsweek. He was on CNN, he was doing all these things and getting really amazing press for it and really interesting opportunities. And I was looking at him and I was saying, “huh, well that’s kinda interesting. Good for him”. And I went on about my life a little.

But, the more these things happen for him and the happier he was looking, I mean he always looked happy, but he seemed really, really happy doing this work. I started to wonder, you know, if that was something that I could possibly do. So I went and talked to Tony about this and he had explained to me how he started moving in that direction, how he started getting opportunities. And this created somewhat of a perfect storm for me.

I didn’t really know how to get to where Tony was necessarily, but I had somebody within arms reach who was talking to me about these things and who was willing to help me for whatever reason.

I wanted to be as fulfilled as he seemed to be. I mean, work was fine. I liked my colleagues, I liked what I was doing. It didn’t necessarily feel like my “purpose,” but it felt like I was doing good work.

So like any good lawyer, I started looking for answers to these questions. And what I found was there are ways to create a personal brand that supports your professional life. And, if you wanted to be an entrepreneur and business owner and can support your business too. So I started down this path and that’s really kind of how I get to where I am today.

So, if you Google the term personal brand, right now you find probably 8 billion different, and I’m not exaggerating, I think it’s literally like 8 billion search results.

So this is a really common topic that is searched by people all over the world.

I didn’t really know what a personal brand was. When I hear the term personal brand, I think of influencers or like this go girls on Tik Tok, people who are posting things online and their lives look perfect and you know, whatever.

But, what I learned is I started to read more about personal brands and see how not just companies, but individuals were creating personal brands online and out in the tangible world.

There’s a ton of really interesting stuff out there. You don’t have to be an influencer, but you don’t have to be a hermit either. And so what I have found through my own kind of work and working with many of my clients is that there’s a balance for everybody when it comes to the personal brand spectrum. And I think about the concept of personal brands really different now.

So the term personal brand was invented or first used people think the earliest we can point to is like the late nineties,1997.

There was this article Fast Company by an expert named Tom Peters. And the title of the article is The Brand Called You. I’ll drop the link to it in the show notes because it’s a really interesting article. What Tom says in this article is that we all need to be “the CEO of me.” He talks a ton about what it means to be the CEO of me. He basically says, you know, you don’t sell the steak, you still the sizzle. Yes, we are the sizzle. And that is what we need to be selling with ourselves. The sizzle to our steak to whatever, our backgrounds and expertise and all that kind of thing is.

And that’s kind of cool, but it makes me feel a little bit uncomfortable. And I think for a lot of people, especially women who want to be entrepreneurs or women with really good ideas, you know, it is hard to brag about yourself. It’s hard to say, Hey, I’m so great, look at me and you should pay me lots of money because of it.

So I don’t think I fall necessarily on the complete end of the spectrum where everything is part of the brand. But on the other hand, I think it is important and useful to create a professional reputation and a professional brand, personal brand that support the type of work that I’m doing.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. If you continue to go down this path with creating a business, having a good personal brand never hurts, particularly, of course, if you’re the face of your brand.

So like myself, I am the brand for my company, at least right now. And so to the extent my personal brand and my company can work together it’s good for all parties involved.

Where I’ve settled, when I think about even the term personal brand, it’s somewhere between, you know, being a sizzle to a steak and just showing up.

It’s helpful to have a strategy. It’s helpful to think about now how I’m going to operate in all these different capacities. I don’t always want to be developing and marketing each and everything I do, so I’m not going to put myself on sale necessarily to the highest bidder.

There’s a sweet spot and I think the sweet spot, this is not something I invented, but the sweet spot is somewhere between how you see yourself and how other people see you. Whereever there’s some overlap in the middle of that, rudimentary Venn diagram, that is where I feel comfortable in talking about personal brands.

This is what I tell my clients in terms of their own personal brands. The most important thing in a personal brand is how you are going to take who you are, who other people see you as, how your overlap those things together to positively impact other people’s lives.

And so, yeah, it’s about your personal brand, it’s about you and your reputation and all of that. But what it really is about is about how you’re going to show up in the world and help other people with the knowledge, the expertise, the experiences that you have.

Forbes ran an article a couple of years ago that I thought was really, really good in terms of how you can use a personal brand, even if you are also a business or creating a business or have a business in the service of other people.

I’ll drop in a link in the show notes, but just at a high level, the article suggests we do seven things to use our personal brands and businesses in the service of others.

(1) The first thing is to share knowledge, which I absolutely love. I mean, that’s what I do on my website. That’s what I do in my podcast. That’s what I do in my private community of entrepreneurs, share knowledge. I love it so much. I give most of it away for free because I think people just really need to have this information.

(2) Number two, give people advice. Like one of the things I have always been known for since I was probably in law school, if not before, is giving other people advice. Not just because you know they could do something for me, but just because, Hey, if you win I, win! I love, you know, helping people figure out ways they can move forward in their own lives.

(3) Number three, provide real time support. So not just like high level advice that you sit around and think of in your own office or bedroom or whatever. But what are the issues people are really, really dealing with and how can you through the work that you’re doing help support them.

(4) Number four, express gratitude. This is something I’ve heard Oprah Winfrey talk about a time expressing gratitude and being grateful and thankful for the opportunities and experiences that we have. One of the things she does, that I had actually started copying a few years ago, is keeping a gratitude journal. Every morning when I wake up, I write down at least three things, hopefully five things, that I’m grateful for that day. Even if that thing is just waking up because you know some days can be hell. But, we know that we can always find things to be grateful for within that.

(5) Number five include others. In using your personal brand in the service of others, include others, reach out to people, bring people into your network or community.

(6) Number six, give feedback. If there are ways that you can be helpful to other people as they’re creating things, or they’re starting to create things, give folks feedback.

(7) Then the seven thing that the Forbes article mentions is being a mentor. I love that because I wouldn’t be here today without mentors. One of my, well actually two of my favorite mentors are law school professors who I absolutely love and adore. I call them. I’ve been out of law school now 15 or more years and I still call my mentors who were my law professors. One of them doesn’t even teach anymore. He’s retired. They are my mentors and I wouldn’t be here without them. So to the extent I can be that to other people, to the extent, you can be that to other people, we can use our personal brands to mentor other people and be of service to other people.

All of this has been part of the journey to my creating my personal brand, developing my expertise and creating my career goals in a more uninhibited way.

I don’t think about work the same way that I did when I graduated from college and law school, I don’t think of work as just the place now where you go to make money. I do believe I can make a difference in other people’s lives.

That has been transformative for me. The fact that I can make money and do the thing I love at the same time, it has been just like one of the things that has changed my life.

In the last few minutes of this podcast episode, what I’d really like to do is give you some tools and suggestions. Forbes had some tools and suggestions that I thought were really helpful. But, I have some things you can actually start to do literally today to create your own personal brand.

And there are four things I really, really want to share because these are things, I implement in my own life and I’ve seen the success I have in my own life and with my clients, and I want to share it with as many people as possible.

There just some patterns that I think, if you use them to create your personal brand, it’ll not only be good for you, it could be good for your business and good for your clients, your customers, and the world. You can literally change the world with some of this stuff.

To start honing in on and developing your own personal brand, there are four simple things that I’m going to ask you to do.

(1) The first is creative vision. I mean, y’all know, I love vision. I talk about vision all the time. Vision is written into my own company’s mission statement. I just believe so strongly in the power of vision and you’ve even been following me for any amount of time at all, you know how I feel about vision. I think it is critical. Actually not just critical, but mandatory for folks who need guidance in finding whatever that light is at the end of the tunnel.

So create a vision for what you want your life and your business and your family and your energy to look like. How do you want to go out and operate in the world? So that’s the first thing. Create a vision.

(2) Number two, develop content. Create content. If the vision is like your big picture blueprint for your personal brand, the content is how you’re going to start to get there.

And the content frankly is how you’re going to get there in your business, to the stuff that you create, is going to be what convinces people to follow you, Bbuy from you, work from you, hire you, consult with you, whatever. This is how you are going to get there.

But, you have to tell somebody, yes you may be brilliant, but if nobody knows, then we will not be able to get to the point where people understand the value that you bring, and want to buy from you and implement whatever it is that you are suggesting, or use the stuff that you’re creating.

In my own life, one of the things I wanted to do was become a professional speaker. I didn’t really know how to do that. I saw other people doing it. I didn’t really know how to do that. But what I did know how to do was write.

And I wrote and I wrote and I wrote, I wrote blog posts. I would pitch myself to just about any media entity. The first thing I pitched, once I kind of felt comfortable blogging, I pitched an Op-Ed in my local newspaper. I was just basically ranting about Facebook. I don’t think anybody would care about it, but they published it and actually got some really good interest out of their article. No business opportunities, because I didn’t really know how to connect all this stuff at that time.

But I was writing and what happened as I wrote and wrote about, back then, it was intellectual property and social media and that kind of thing, people started inviting me to speak about things.

So like the news or like people who were putting conferences together, I was shocked that I can get paid to talk about some of this stuff.

And with professional speakers, some of the most coveted stages are stages like TED or TEDx or South by Southwest (SXSW) in Austin, which happens in March of every year.

I didn’t know how to get to those places either. But I was writing and writing and writing. And one day a TEDx organizer called me and said, hey, we read some of the stuff you wrote about–at the time I was writing about memes and the internet. And, they were considering me to speak about memes because of this article I wrote, if I was interested. And then the person who invented the word meme, who’s still alive.

Ultimately these TEDx organizers chose me and they chose me for many reasons. Not to say that the person who invented the word is not brilliant and dynamic and important and all those things, but I’d been writing about stuff for so long and connecting it to, you know, practical things that were happening today.

It was relevant in that moment in time. And that wouldn’t have happened if I wasn’t out there creating content.

So after you create a vision, your next step is to create content that communicates what you want other people to know about you and about your expertise and about your business.

And that can mean, you know any number of different things. It could be blog posts, videos, podcasts, articles, GIFs, pictures, whatever. I mean the phrase “content creation” and “content creators,” those are like these huge buzzwords right now. The rise of social media has really made it kind of like a gold rush, if you will, of competition for content creators and capturing people’s attention.

So your content is how you can capture people’s attention to build not only your personal brand, if you’re writing about things that your business offers or or products that you’re creating that are changing the world and changing people’s lives, you will get interest from that.

So you should be regularly creating content that displays your expertise in a particular field or industry and also shows how that expertise can change people’s lives, can answer questions of interest, can improve things people are working on. That will help you attract the opportunities you want.

(3) So if you’ve created a vision, if you’ve developed content, then obviously the next thing you have to do is share that content. What I believe and people disagree with me and I’m fine with that. What I believe is that you should share your content on your own platform first. So have you ever website, an email newsletter, an app, something, something you control, you know as much as we can control things in this digital age, share your stuff on your own platforms first.

(4) Then, the fourth thing, after you’ve shared your message on your own platform, leverage other people’s platforms.

I don’t know if y’all remember that song by Naughty By Nature, OPP, other people’s…well, other people’s lots of things, but share your, your message, share your content on other people’s platforms, the Facebooks, they YouTube the LinkedIns. Figuring out a strategy for getting your content somewhere else, leveraging the audience and the exposure that other people have. I.

Mentioned the TEDx stage a couple of minutes ago. Once I gave that TEDx talk, the world opened up in terms of who was interested in me speaking places, who was interested in hiring me as a consultant or to do different things revolving around the topic that I spoke about on the TEDx stage.

So if you are going to pursue creating a personal brand that supports your business and also improves the lives of others, consider doing those four things: (1) creating a vision, (2) developing content, (3) sharing your message on your own platform and then (4) leveraging other people’s platforms. Thanks.

Thank you so much for listening to this episode of The Shontavia Show. If you enjoyed this episode, please be sure to like, subscribe and leave a comment wherever you’re listening. You can find me on social media everywhere, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and wherever else, @ShontaviaJEsq. You can also visit me at shontavia.com to find a transcript of this episode, along with other show notes. While you’re there, please be sure to subscribe to my email newsletter.

The information shared in this podcast and through my other platforms is designed to educate you about business and entrepreneurship, and I love to do this work. While I am a lawyer, though, the information I provide is not legal advice and does not create or constitute an attorney client relationship.

The Shontavia Show is a LVRG Inc. Original. The show is recorded on site in South Carolina and produced at Sit N Spin Studios in Greenville, South Carolina. Original music and sound design is by Matt Morgan and Daniel Gregory. Mixing and mastering is by Daniel Gregory. And the video is by GVL media.