How to build a personal brand that drives business success with Amelia Sordell

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0:41We look forward to seeing you there. You're Harvey Specter. You don't need to watch game film. Do you know who's watched more game film than anybody? No. Who? Michael Jordan. How do you know that? You don't believe me? Let's call him. You have Michael Jordan's phone number? Yep. If I hit this button right here, I call Michael Jordan? That's kind of how a phone works. I'm doing it. Go for it. I'm gonna ask him about baseball. Do not ask him about baseball. Ah! Wrong number! You're kidding me. Oh, my God. Who are you? Look, you were giving me shit this morning because I come and go when I want to.

1:16You know why I can do that? Because when I got here, I dominated. They thought I worked 100 hours a day. Now, no matter what time I get in, nobody questions my ability to get the job done. Get it through your head. First impressions last. You start behind the eight ball, you'll never get in front. Those were two scenes from the TV show Suits. With his charm, confidence, communication skills and dress sense, Harvey Specter is one of the show's main protagonists and someone that many still idolise. It's not just about being a great lawyer, it's about being a larger-than-life figure who commands respect, inspires loyalty and consistently delivers results.

1:57In the world of suits, Spectre is the epitome of how to build and maintain a powerful personal brand.

2:14I'm Josh Dornbrack and this is the Business Leader Podcast. Today, we focus on personal branding. If you're a regular user of LinkedIn, you might get a feeling of deja vu whenever you scroll through your feed. People's posts, whether quotes, pictures or videos, all largely look the same. That's because when one person breaks through the social zeitgeist, many are quick to replicate, hoping for the same glimpse of LinkedIn fame. But that's not the right way to approach personal branding, argues Amelia Sordell, the author of the Personal Branding Playbook.

2:52You know, it's a funny one, because I think a lot of people think that personal brand, because the word personal and brand is used people think it's like this look at me exercise it's a me me me thing and if you look to linkedin you probably fooled into thinking that was the truth right there is so much garbage on the platform just like there's so much garbage on tiktok and instagram just people churning out stuff that to be honest is sort of navel gazing slash copying other people's stuff and of course it gets results right and i understand why those people do it it's absolutely no shade to them you know if they've seen a playbook done well by stephen bartlett or someone else and they go of course that works for him so it must work for me And I think the thing that a lot of people probably get wrong is your personal brand is your personal life.

3:31Like it's not different. It is the same. It is simply a word, a buzzword, a marketing term for your reputation at scale. And when I speak to CEOs or founders, et cetera, when we start kind of working with them or we potentially going to work with them, they're always very nervous about, you know, do I have to be posting pictures of my kids on holiday? and do I have to be really posting this kind of cringe-worthy quotes and stuff? And the answer is always no. Like your personal brand is personal to you, but it's not a brand. It's not this shiny removed object that we invent. It's something that we build, grow and hopefully monetize for people.

4:04And I think once people realize the sort of benchmark for your personal brand is simply how you communicate in a conversation like this, or potentially the acid test for you is how do you communicate with your favorite customer or someone you've got a huge amount of respect for, flip that on its head and instead of having a one-to-one conversation you're having it one-to-many. So Dell runs the personal branding agency Clout but got into the industry almost by mistake. I founded a business when I was very young, grew that business quite successfully year one and then failed quite dramatically year two as many many startup founders and business owners can probably relate to like that initial business failure is sort of a rite of passage I think in many ways for someone to go on and do something great but I'd done that and had to re-enter the workforce and I remember sitting at my desk at home and typing in what is the one job that you can do that pays you the most amount of money with no experience and the number one thing that came up was recruitment and so I kind of went about finding recruitment jobs and was lucky enough to land one with a company that was based in Manchester in the UK and I was horrified that the first thing they wanted me to do was to make 100 calls a day and be three and a half hours on the phone I just thought it was such an inefficient use of time particularly when you know of those 500 odd calls a week I was making we were really only getting one or two jobs on if we were lucky so the odds of actually speaking to a decision maker and getting something on it from as obtained to business was just terrible really and so what I started doing using kind of my marketing knowledge I guess from when I ran my business was I started putting together lists on LinkedIn they didn't have sales navigator back then it didn't definitely didn't exist how it does now but I was creating lists on LinkedIn of CEOs of very specific companies and I was basically sending them mail mergers probably illegally obtained their email address somewhere but I was sending them mail mergers and the response that I got from that kind of 20 to 30 person list was like a 70 % open rate 50 % response rate and then 20 % of them were like yeah cool let's have a conversation and I sort of thought oh okay but like I'm either really a genius or I've hacked something here in that no one is reaching these people in this way and so I then tried to scale that out a few years later again didn't know it was personal branding through posting content on LinkedIn because I thought well I can have 20 to 30 conversations a day via email maybe I could have 200 conversations a day if I post what I'm sending these people and that then obviously snowballed and became known as what is now personal branding and my following went from sort of 1500 people to about 15 ,000 very quickly you know about three to six months I managed to do that and then I started getting people messaging me saying hey how did you do that and kind of a light bulb went on that that entrepreneur that nearly died with that initial business failure but didn't quite go was like I should do something with this this is the thing I've been waiting for and the pandemic happened it's very lucky to be in a safe job and I decided to quit and start a business in the middle of a economic turmoil and a viral pandemic and the rest is history I've now I've got nearly 350 ,000 followers across social media, which animated$4 million plus in revenue, business revenue off the back of my LinkedIn profile.

7:14And I get to do amazing things like this with you, Josh. When you kind of look across your posts and the things you put up, it all seems very genuine. It almost feels like you're putting a part of yourself out there. It's almost like you're people's friend. That's kind of how it comes across. And that's a great testament to how you've built that brand. But what would you say are kind of the key elements to kind of building a strong personal brand. I'm really glad you said that, Josh, actually, because that has always been my intention. I don't want followers. I want friends. And I think a lot of people go into personal branding as they believe it to be, which is online or on LinkedIn or whatever, with the sole purpose of getting as many followers as humanly possible.

7:51And I understand that thought process because followers breeds attention, attention breeds opportunity. But if those followers are not really aligned to who you are, what you're trying to achieve, like the exact kind of audience profile that's actually going to move the needle for whatever it is that your goal is it doesn't really matter whether they're following you or not it's like having a bunch of friends that you don't really like hanging out with and so it's always been intentional of me to be as authentic as possible to try and attract a specific type of person so that i can then build a profile off the back of it to your question about how what are the kind of fundamentals i think having a very clear goal is important you would never start running ads without having a goal in mind you would never build a business or start a business without a goal in mind you would never go and start looking for a house without thinking you were going to buy one but I think you need to have a very clear goal in mind like do I want a new job am I trying to win new business for my business do I want to hire new team members do we need capital investment are we looking for angel investors like what is your goal with this do you want to get on our honors list somewhere the next kind of step to that is who do I need to attract to make that happen and a lot of people kind of misunderstand the what do you want to be known for piece about this right so a lot of personal branding strategists myself included in the past would say so what do you want to be known for and people would say well recruitment accounting services like and they would list off all these things that they do but they didn't quite understand because they didn't work in marketing actually people don't want to know you for those things they want to know you for the outcome of those things so if you're a recruiter then you need to be known for like being a good employer good at hiring good at you know championing employees like really being a candidate and an employer's best friend for example and so understanding who you're trying to attract specifically allows you to then which is the third step create content that speaks directly to them you know you said a minute ago like it feels like you're you've got friends not followers that is because all the content I put out there is specifically designed for a specific person to feel seen in what I'm saying and therefore get value from it in some capacity whether it's they feel like I've empathized with them or I've understand a particular pain point and I've given them a solution to that pain point or simply that I've just put something out there that they're like oh my god yes like I can completely relate to that and that then in turn builds trust with my audience so then when I'm ready to launch my playbook or launch my book or talk about the fact that we work with these incredible founders on a retained basis people want to buy from me if they're the right client because they've already kind of gone through the pipeline of do we like her do we trust her is there a proven track record etc because they feel like I've acknowledged them and they feel seen in what I'm saying and so if you're a founder or you're a CEO and you're thinking about building a personal brand you have to be razor clear on who are you trying to attract and moreover why are you trying to attract them if you actually want to make a dent in it when people say the term personal branding your mind immediately goes to oh well this is what I post on LinkedIn this is what I post on social media but you are very specific in saying this is bigger than just what you put on social media this is how you engage with people in person and and how you're seen that way too yeah it's who you are what you wear how you communicate how you behave what you know what you're passionate about your values for example I am nice to everyone or at least I try to be you might catch me on a bad day every now and again but I try intentionally to make sure that every single person I engage with whether it be someone who accidentally bumped into me on the tube or someone I meet at a conference or the barista who handed me my coffee this morning I try and treat every single person with respect with kindness and with the biggest smile I can possibly muster in my caffeine deficient face because on one hand I am genuinely a happy person and I like to make other people happy and that makes me happy but on the other hand strategically you never know who you're going to meet and you never know what that interaction might lead to and kindness and being nice and shaking people's hands and all that kind of stuff doesn't matter if you're getting something out of that person it only matters when you have nothing to get out of that person and that for me is the like absolute antithesis of what personal branding is it's looking at outward at how you want the world to receive you and go maybe I'm slightly misaligned on this for example I'm a serious business person and I'm showing up to meetings in a hoodie does that align maybe maybe not and maybe I'm a creative and I'm showing up to meetings in a shirt and a tie does that align maybe not so having a kind of thought process around all of it and then putting a strategy behind that means that you can go from where you are now to where you want to be in the future both physically emotionally knowledge-wise, money-wise, all of that, and putting a plan in place to make that happen.

12:39One of the biggest conundrums business leaders face is how closely their personal brand should be tied to their company brand. While they're connected, they play very distinct roles. On LinkedIn specifically, it ranks members' content above company updates and sponsored ads. so if you're a company posting company content and don't have any members of your employee you know who are on your payroll or your founder posting member content on linkedin no one will find your company page and so what ends up happening is people spend all this time all this energy spend all this money with agencies to grow their company brands without really understanding that that is like a second stage in a funnel it's not a first stage in a funnel and so you have to do it if you want to grow your company page and if you want to grow your company brand I think to your question about should they be the same should they be different they are sisters not twins if you are the founder particularly of a business your business is going to be intrinsically aligned with your values your thought process and even if you're an employed CEO you are going to put onto the business you're running your thoughts your opinions everything because that is the reality right so you need to understand that there is going to be similarities between the content going out on the company page and the content going out on your personal page however people don't trust brands 92 percent of people trust the opinion of a stranger over a company brand online and about 50 percent of your market value as a business is dependent on the reputation of the ceo so if you're not actively posting content beyond updates by the way we don't just want notifications we want why did you found it what happened last week and why is it important were you at davos what did that mean for the business just it doesn't have to be deep it doesn't have to be your holiday picks.

14:21It doesn't have to be the car you drive, the watch you wear, any of that nonsense. It just has to be you having a voice outside of the boundaries of your brand. And what that will do is it will give your brand a voice beyond the marketing approved stuff, which makes it more authentic, more interesting, more likable, etc. But also you can say things on a personal page that you can't say on a company page. And not from a negative perspective, but you couldn't go on a company page and be like, I'm so fucking proud of my team for doing X, Y, Z, because it just wouldn't really make sense. Because why would a company be proud of a team?

14:55You want the CEO to be proud of the team. So I think it's really, really important, particularly in 2025, when attention is the number one asset for a business to have, that if you want to generate it, you need to be leading from the front. And I do think not everyone should build a personal brand. But I do think that every business should have a culture of personal branding within it. Yeah. And expanding on that last thread you said, you know, if you've got 40 employees, those are potentially 39 to 40 touch points that you can have to do with your business. But frankly, a lot of people are very intimidated.

15:28Can you kind of touch on in the book that, you know, you worked with somebody who was very anti kind of giving people, you know, they're going to get poached or they're going to get noticed somewhere else. But you're very much an advocate of just let employees do that because that's the best way that you can kind of cut through. Yeah, I think that TripAdvisor exists for a reason glass door exists for a reason i said earlier 92 of people trust the opinion of a stranger online and you've already got these people on payroll right so why wouldn't you want to use them as a distribution channel for your business like to me it's like literally having 50 more revenue streams and going nah we're quite happy with these two that we've got like it's so stupid to me however i do understand the kind of nuance of the more visible and more visibly good an employee is, the more likely they are to be poached.

16:15The one thing I would caveat that with is if your team are posting content and they get poached as a result of that, they didn't get poached because they posted content. They got poached because they weren't happy where they are. You know, my team have been peppered with in-mails from recruiters and hiring managers for years, years, right? Because, you know, Cloud has a big brand. We're known to be the best in the space and they hammer us, right? The average tenure of my employees is like three and a half years, which is much higher than the average employee. And many of them who I've employed, you know, year one are still here, right?

16:49So I think to your question, like what's the worry about it? I think people need to understand that your fear of losing people through posting on content is actually an excuse for your lack of leadership and your lack of employee engagement already.

17:12you know when you look at business it's all about measurables it's all about you know kpis making sure everyone's kind of hitting their targets and throughout the business that could be the case how can leaders truly and what's the best way to measure kind of success of their personal branding efforts online should we say the best way i think to measure how well your personal brand is actually doing is hilariously in the unmeasurable, which is the anecdotal. So it's the messages that you receive, it is the feedback you get in meetings, it's the, I saw your post today, Josh, I really loved it, even though that person didn't engage.

17:46And I appreciate from a data-heavy, data-informed world that we live in, is those anecdotal things don't necessarily make you go, well, that post translated into that amount of dollars on my bottom line. But what I need you to understand is it's very hard to measure trust. Trust is invisible. It's like an invisible line between two millions of people. It's very easy to break. It's very hard to create. And that is what personal branding does. It creates those invisible lines to people who like you, who know you, who trust you, who may never engage with your content, but see it. And I think something that's worth leaving your audience with is we like to look at personal branding into two communities.

18:27You have community and you have customer. Your community will really ride or die for you. They'll love your content. They'll engage with it. They'll root for you to the sidelines. They're going to refer you work. They're going to really be like, oh my God, every time you post, give you loads of likes and that kind of stuff, but will very rarely buy from you. Your customer will watch those people engaging with your content and go, wow, that person is interesting. A lot of people like them. Same as a TripAdvisor review, right? You read all the negative and positive reviews before you decide whether or not you're going to go and stay in that hotel.

18:56This is what your customer is doing. They're looking at the reviews, the social proof that you say who you say you are. And then they go, hey, Josh, that was really interesting. You said that. I saw your post the other day. And it's those little anecdotal moments that are such a good measure of whether or not it's working beyond audience profile, beyond impressions, beyond likes and engagement and all that kind of stuff. You know, obviously, cloud's been going for it for a few years now. Are there any kind of particular, really impressive case studies, ones that you're really, really proud of?

19:24Maybe leaders who have come and have been super skeptical but I've actually kind of bought into it 100 % no it's really interesting like there's tons I could give you that we've got loads of followers for you know we've got a couple on the books at the minute who are probably the most well-known entrepreneurs in the UK at the minute and we've done a great job of kind of blowing their social media profiles up so very proud of the team the one that sticks out actually is I did some work with Skybet you know as one of our big first kind of clients and you know I've done quite a few quite a lot of work with them now and i remember when we went into the leadership team one of the senior leaders aka on this on the board um so you know the top of the of the food chain turned up to the session was so anti-linked in was like this is a waste of my time why am i here and just really sulked through the whole session and we were doing three sessions two group one one-to-one and i thought my gosh this is going to be a tough one because he is just not budging on this and he's not bought into it and how do i navigate the almost like passive aggressiveness to the rhetoric we were having and by the end of our kind of period working together he was really brought in and now this guy um has got thousands of followers on linkedin um he gets paid to go and speak on stages all around the world he's done podcasts he's consistently posting still to this day and that was four years ago and that to me is the perfect example of zero to hero.

20:52He's not mainstream famous. He hasn't got, you know, millions of followers, but he has a very bought-in, engaged audience of people who are in the same sector that he's in, that are the same level that he's in, that then want to go and pay and see him on stage. And that has opened so many doors for him outside of his work that he would never have had access to had he not started posting on LinkedIn.

21:20you've been listening to the business leader podcast with me josh dawnbrack amelia sawdell's book the personal branding playbook turn your personality into your competitive advantage is available now for more business masterclasses and case studies please check out businessleader.co.uk

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