The truth about personal branding and what leaders get wrong

0:00This is Britain's growth moment. Do you want to be part of it? On 26th of March, 750 of the UK's most ambitious founders, CEOs and investors will gather in London to shape the future of mid-sized business. The company's driving our nation's success. The Business Leader Summit 2026 isn't just another conference. It's a day built around the three forces that define growth, ambition, policy and capital. And as one of our valued podcast listeners, you can be there in person. To secure a discounted ticket, visit the events section of our business leader website and use this code. BL podcast, all one word, all uppercase.

0:41We look forward to seeing you there. We were in the Daily Mail pretty much every week for about eight months. We hit that revenue target 14 hours after we launched. After six months about that, I lost everything though. You know everyone needs a personal brand, but we all need a why. If you don't believe in what you're saying and you're not excited about what you're saying, then why do you expect Dylan and us to be? I'm not here trying to charge you an obscene amount of money because I actually wish when I was you six years ago, just getting started, that someone was like, no, no, this is how you do it.

1:07Hello and welcome to the Business Leader Podcast. I'm Josh Dornbrack. And I'm Lucy McPhee. And today we're happy to be joined by Amelia Sordell. She started building her personal brand on LinkedIn in 2018. Since then, she has quit her job, launched a business and made it into a four million enterprise. She trains teams, builds founder brands and helps businesses turn their people into their biggest PR machine. She's a LinkedIn top voice and a business leader expert sharing her expertise in Business Leader magazine and on our website. We talk about leading with authenticity, breaking out of your comfort zone and much more.

1:42Please enjoy our conversation with Amelia Sordell. Amelia Sordell, thank you so much for joining us. We will get to your story and your personal branding expertise, but I want to start with something. the dedication that you wrote in your book, The Personal Branding Playbook. This book is dedicated to anyone and everyone who has ever had the audacity to be 100 % okay with the consequences of being themselves on and offline. How do you... What made you write that? Do you know what? Well, first of all, it was kind of a panic purchase. I'd finished writing the book and they were like, you need to do the acknowledgements.

2:18I was like, fine, I'll go and do the acknowledgements. And they were like, oh, you need to do the dedication. I was like, shit, I don't know who to dedicate this to me. And then when I started thinking about it, and the truth of what I'm about to say is still true today, we hold so much of ourselves back because we're worried about the judgment of someone who doesn't have the bollocks to do what we are trying to do. My pursuit of personal branding, I suppose, has been less about creating a business and a career doing it and more about the personal development journey that I've gone on in building it.

2:45And so in that little statement, which gets brought up a lot because everyone's like, oh, wow, that's like, you know, a bit of a slap in your face kind of dedication but i really do believe that the world has changed by people who have the audacity just to give it a go and just see what happens and we all are just operating from like varying degrees of data none of us really know what we're doing um even if we think we look like we know what we're doing none of us really do and i'd want other people to read that and be like okay cool so if she can do that while she was a single mom going through a divorce and two like two lawsuits like i can figure it out yeah yeah absolutely amazing so going back a bit what kind of environment did you grow up in how do you think it shaped your ambition and creativity that's such a good question I've never been asked that before I grew up so mum dad dad worked full time mum did a bit of work here and there but was very successful before we had children and kind of gave it all up to raise us which I've always felt I guess a level of admiration for because like being a mum is a full-time unpaid job anyway and then to have been so ambitious and been a director of a company and then stop doing that to then raise two children is like quite unlike like, wow, like, you are superwoman.

3:50Like, I don't know if I could have done that. But growing up, it was mum, dad, my brother and I. Typical sibling rivalry. Like, nothing, to this day, nothing humbles you like a sibling. I'll win some award and my brother will be like, what does that mean you're the most obnoxious person? Like, I won LinkedIn Top Voice and he was like, does that mean you're the most obnoxious person on LinkedIn? And I was like, yeah, basically. Fantastic. Well done or whatever. But yeah, very, like, happy childhood. You know, my brother and I are still very, very close. We spend a huge amount of time together. And I voluntarily spend a lot of time with my family.

4:21Like we are, like, I don't know. I don't know how to liken it as like a less sort of drug-fueled and maybe almost as drug version of the Osbournes. I don't know if you remember that. I used to watch that. Yeah, on MTV. It's just like, they're so dysfunctional, but they just love each other so much. And that was what my childhood was like. But how it shaped me is, one of the things that I'm very, very grateful for my father, at the time I thought he was quite sharp, should we say, as a dad. but I'm very grateful for the way he raised us because we would come home and we would be like, you know, with our newly found political views being like, this is what I think.

4:55And he'd be like, prove it. Give me a good enough argument where I will think about it. And he did that at every dinner table. So every time we came with an idea or an opinion or whatever, he'd be like, back it up with that. Like, give me the reason why. And he would debate us, like, sometimes to the point of tears. And we'd be like, just stop being mean to me. But actually what that instilled in my brother and I is like not just the courage to speak up for ourselves and and also support what we're saying with data and not just go like, I believe that. So it's true. Even now, like I'll follow people on social media who I probably disagree with 90 percent of what they're saying just to challenge my thought process and stuff, which I think is really important because social media gives you such a algorithmic version of the truth.

5:42Like it gives you, you know, you like something goes, oh, you like that. I'm going to give you more of that. And so you never really get challenged by your own ideas. And so I think if you're not being challenged by your own, how can you expand them? So I had that at home. And that, like, I guess upbringing has made me, although I didn't feel confident, probably in hindsight, gave me the confidence to have the audacity to be myself. Because I'm like, well, I grew up in a household where debate was encouraged and having difference of opinion and diversity of thought was a really good thing. To then go to the workforce or, you know, even now I'm doing public speaking and stuff and someone's like, I don't agree with you.

6:15I'm like, okay, why? It doesn't make you feel like, oh my gosh. Like, you know, so yeah. That's fantastic. I love that. It sounds like you had some really good mentors kind of growing up. And I guess, you know, we'll get onto your entrepreneurial exploits, shall we say, but - Exploits it was. Do you think you were entrepreneurial as a kid? Cookie cutter, Josh. Like I was, I would charge, I vividly remember charging my parents 20p for hand massage. Like they'd be in bed like this and I'd be like, it's 20p. And actually, the prices have gone up this week. Selling my toys outside the front of our house.

6:51Like, you know, just anything and everything to make a buck, basically. Like I was willing to do. And I've had multiple attempts at starting a business. You know, when I was much, much younger, I had an eBay business where I bought and sold sample clothes. And, you know, I'd go and find Levi jeans. In fact, I'm wearing a pair that I found in a thrift store now. I'd go and find Levi jeans in thrift stores. I'd wash them, iron them, and then put them on eBay for like three times the price that I bought them. And I go to sample sales. I grew up in Chiswick and there's a big town hall there and it's quite a relatively middle class area.

7:21So they have like Mulberry sample sales and like all this kind of stuff. So I trot along there with my like 50 pounds pocket money that I'd saved up for the last three years and like buy a Mulberry purse and then resell it on eBay for like 150 quid and then go and do it again. So that was like my constant thing was always like, how can I make money? And my mum always jokes that, you know, when I was at university, university I was university full-time so lectures during the day I was then working in a nightclub Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday Sunday um Saturday and then on a Saturday daytime 10 till 6 I was in a clothes shop working cash in hand so I worked like you know 100 to 150 hours a week every week for three and a half years and she jokes that the reason why I did that is because I did not want to live in halls like the the idea of having to live with I'll share my things with other people and whatever she was like you were so motivated to like have it all at such a young age that like you just did whatever it took and i'll never forget the the money that i made which was absolutely nothing because like minimum wage back then was like five or an hour or something right yeah to work you know 10 to 6 cash in hand as well like i was making no money and i remember i was the reason i worked that cash in hand job is i desperately wanted to design a bag i love fashion i've always loved fashion my first proper business was a fashion brand which we can get into in a minute um I desperately wanted this bag back when Louis Vuitton bags were like 500 pounds and not 5 ,000 pounds inflation is a crazy thing and I remember saving up for like a year and a half for this bag and I still have it and going to the shop and being like here's my cash though I've just saved up for like three years for like can I have that bag please and still to the same I'm like that bag is my favorite bag because it's like represented like all of that hustle yeah brilliant I mean, I wish I had that way of thinking when I was at uni because living in halls was the worst experience of my life.

9:05I won't lie. I've been bougie since day dot. I've been drinking sparkling water because I was about 15. Brilliant. So speaking of your first business, you launched it at 21? Yes. Yeah, so tell us a bit about that. Either side, yeah. So it was a clothing brand. We initially started off doing women's wear and then kind of went into men's wear as well and got investment for it, did really, really well. in the first kind of 18 months, a year to 18 months, was stocked in 15 different boutiques. ASOS wanted to stock us. So we were like really, when we launched this around the same time as Celeb Boutique, which is now called House of CB, which is like a 50 million pound company.

9:42Like it's a huge, huge business. And Connor Walker, who's the founder of that business, and I kind of started the same year in the same way. We were buying and selling stuff on eBay. And like we kind of like built up from there. And it was doing really, really well. You know, we were in the Daily Mail almost every single week because I'd worked out that back then there was no such thing as an influencer. There was just celebrities. And if you wanted your celebrities to wear your stuff, you had to gift them. There was none of this, like, we'll pay you to wear our stuff. It was a gifting thing and you'd just pray.

10:08So I'd send these massive care packages out to, like, Colleen Rooney, Daniel Lloyd, Cheryl Cole. So at the time they were, like, the influencers. Like, the wags were, like, the ultimate. Alex Gerrard. and I'd send them these massive bags full of like gorgeous dresses and coats and hats and like all this kind of stuff with this little handwritten note being like, hi, you know, Alex, my name's Amelia, I'm running this business, would be so grateful that if you do wear it, like just, you know, let us know because we'd love to get some pictures or whatever. Very rarely did they. But I had the foresight to be like, how many other people are probably sending them stuff?

10:45It's probably like thousands, right? Yeah. So if they are going to wear it, they're probably going to forget who gave it to them. so why don't I just in the back end of my wordpress website or a shopify website actually just write like in the meta tags that this is danielle lloyd's coat or like colleen rooney's coat yeah so if they do wear it and back then the daily mail had this thing where if they pictured a celebrity in something they'd match up the clothes to wear the the from to the brand it's great for click through right yeah so i was like let me just see and i started meta tagging all of my clothes i'd sent out to various different celebrities with their names on it so again Maiden Chelsea was massive at the time Howie was massive at the time so I'd send all these bandage dresses to these girls who basically lived in bandage dresses so of course they like wore them yeah and all of a sudden our our like clicks and our our purchases just went through the roof because we were in the Daily Mail pretty much every week for about eight months because every single time someone wore something they'd be like oh that's where that's from right connect the dots and so yeah brilliant um after about that after six months about that i lost everything though it it it shut down and i should have given maybe more dramatic build-up to that i felt dramatic to me yeah it it's a funny thing retail so retail it may still work like this i'm sure um when you sell into retail as a brand you get paid 30 on the order so if you've got a collection you know asos will pay you 30 up front for purchasing part of that collection you then get paid the rest which is basically your profit um on delivery and i you know kind of done the runs for the work there was this new brand the new retailer that come in saying we want like about a hundred thousand pounds worth of stuff from you we love you you're great whatever and i think i was naive that i didn't vet them like my due due diligence was basically looking them up on company's house and they're like they're a company that exists yes we can work with them um and between them placing that order and it being delivered they cease to exist so i was left with like a hundred grams worth of stock i just couldn't shift because although the numbers were growing on the website we couldn't get the numbers to shift that volume of stock within the seasonal time frame and all of my other suppliers like retailers had already bought all of their stock and they were like we don't need anymore so i was faced with this like thing of i have all of this all of my money is basically tied up in this stock that i can't sell and i need that money to then pay for the next collection to keep the business growing and keep people purchasing from the company so i was faced with the decision at like 23 i think i was when i when i were nearly 2024 basically to take a personal loan out which was guaranteed by me personally um which was very scary at 23 it's like scary now i'm like limited only um or shut it down and liquidate everything and sell everything on overstock and you know to places like tk maxx and whatever and that's ultimately what i did um i just at the time it felt like a death i think i said this when we spoke um previously but you grieve something like that like because because you put your whole identity and i'm sure other business owners can relate into your business it becomes you and then when it fails it feels you feel like you failed yeah not the business has failed you have failed and the feeling like you have failed is one of the most darkest awful feelings you can feel and i felt like that for probably 10 years and like i wasn't enough i wasn't good enough wasn't smart enough wasn't strong enough i wasn't clever enough all of that stuff and that's why that business failed and actually why it failed was I was just a bit naive and also the retailer was just a bit shitty like you know what I mean and in hindsight experience now tells me I would never have done business with that person and I've had plenty of opportunities now where I've had opportunities to not obviously not in retail but do deals with people and I've ultimately walked away from it because I knew it wasn't right and I knew it wasn't right then but I was so blinded by the thought of having a hundred grand order that I was like okay take my clothes um so I'm grateful for the experience because you know failing like that galvanizes you a lot but also now you know I've had made the bad decisions the bad decisions have given me the experience and the experience now enables me to make good decisions.

14:43I love that because you you were you were so honest about this and you know you've you've posted it on on your social channels about being really honest that's that's effectively a 10-year wound that is it's very very difficult to get over you kind of said that much when did you kind of get to the stage that you were like Like, I need to be honest. I need to share this. I need to be authentic, as you've kind of said. And I guess, you know, was that did you still flinch even when you first decided to put that out there and be that that open person who's being vulnerable? Or, you know, take me back to when you first kind of put that out there.

15:17Do you know what's really interesting? So I believe that you have these big red button moments in life and we all have them. We just sometimes don't know that like we don't call them that. it will be you're presented with a crossroads or a decision to make and if you do one thing then everything stays the same and it's all very safe and predictable and whatever and if you do the other thing you blow up your entire life you have no idea what's going to happen and like that is often the reason why people don't take any steps forward they just sit in whatever misery they're sitting in because the misery although horrible is more comfortable and predictable than blowing up your life and not knowing what's going to happen um and so i had one of those big red button moments in 2020 um well actually it was earlier than that it was probably 2019 i had another one in 2020 and i was faced with this kind of decision of like do you really want to live like this and worry about all of these things that you're worrying about for the rest of your life or are you going to do something about it and the way that i guess that sort of formulated was i was in marketing at the time and my then ceo had no fucking idea what he was doing still doesn't know what he's doing um and disagreed with basically all of the strategies that i was bringing to the table so i was like instead of asking for permission i'm just going to assume i have it and just like go for it because if it goes badly then whatever i'm back to square one if it goes well then i'm going to get a big fat congratulations and hopefully a pay rise um so i was just like you know what and that was that moment where i was just like let's just go and see what happens and i guess back to your question about what was that one one moment i shared all of my failures and all of my fuck-ups and it's definitely become part of my brand now it's like going from failure to failure without a lack of enthusiasm um but people love that right because that's how many yeah i mean it's becoming more yeah it's becoming more kind of in vogue now to talk about all your issues but you know there's still a little bit of ego there there's still a little bit of like bruised oh i don't want i don't know what people are going to say the one thing i'd say about that though Josh is like people find it very easy to talk about their failures when there's lots of hindsight and they're really successful people don't talk about their failures when it's in real time and they're not really successful yet and I think that's in part why I've managed to build a brand around having audacity because I just say it when it's not going well like you know the business has like my agency has had a an interesting time over the last two years and I've been very honest about it like I haven't been like it's great guys I'm like it's been shit and i am tired and i need a break and i'm burnt out and all of these things and i think that that we can call it authenticity you can call it audacity you can call it honesty you can call it whatever you want but that's enabled me to connect with people in a completely different way because i'm not some you know multi-millionaire who's sitting on the top of their throne having lost it or rebuilt it three times and now i've exited like peace out i'm still in the trenches and i'm just like i'm with everyone else in the trenches and i feel that's important um But yeah, it is very popular now to talk about your failures because like everyone fails, right?

18:16And that's the thing that connects us is we all fail, whether it's being rejected by a date or rejected by a founder or a business owner or whatever. Being fired, we all have experienced that kind of thing. Exactly. You're very deliberate in your book about defining why in building personal brand and creating clear goals related to that. Do you think this is a step people often miss? You know, it's an interesting thing. So I read the, I did the audio book of the personal writing playbook about three weeks ago. And I wrote the book two years ago. So it's so interesting and quite cathartic actually reading what I wrote back now because I'm like, I would have changed so much of this.

18:54Oh, really? And it's interesting that so much changes in such a short period of time. And do I think it's important to have a why in building a personal brand? I think probably no, but I do think that it's important that you need a why as to why you're doing it. Like, I used to think the personal branding, like, everyone needed to do it. Like, it's the best thing ever. Like, whatever. And what I've learned, actually, through running an agency and working with very wealthy people who want to have a personal brand and have absolutely no personality, is not everyone should have a personal brand. Exactly.

19:29Not everyone should have a personal brand. And you know everyone needs a personal brand, but we all need a why. we all need a like why am i here today why am i why am i releasing this course i've just released like you know why am i not working in my agency in the same capacity that i was before why why am i wanting to have children why am i wanting to get married why am i not wanting like we all have a why and i think oftentimes we spend a huge amount of time thinking about the the thing that we're doing and not enough about why we're doing it and the why we're doing it is often the thing that keeps us going, which is the point that I made in the book.

20:06When you don't feel motivated, like motivation is totally overrated. I am not motivated most days. I wake up at five o 'clock this morning. I was like, really? I've got so much to do. I would much rather just be in bed with a cup of coffee. I could watch Selling Sunset this morning and that would be great. We keep me just I'm very motivated to do that. Yes. But that's not going to get you where you want to go. Right. So your why becomes then the thing that makes you disciplined enough to do it. So there's been plenty of days where I've had posts that get no likes or worse, they get one like from me.

20:43Really embarrassing stuff. But, you know, I did it because I knew that if I put myself out there and spoke about what I was working on and try to build somewhat of an audience that I would stop having to wait for someone else with someone else's permission to be like, you're good enough and start just assuming again, I have it. like because I'm out here being a thought leader right so people will start to think of you like a thought leader um so I don't think you need a why to build a personal brand but you bloody well need a why to to exist because you know why else are you going to do anything like life's so easy you can literally deliver your shopping to your front door yes that's very true I mean if you if you're someone who has heard a lot about personal branding and say it's a it's a leader who's like that's something I really want to get into but they might be a little bit introverted they might be like why am I shouting about this like you know it's just it doesn't come naturally to some people um what would you kind of say to someone who feels like that like you mentioned not everyone needs a personal brand but you know for some people they may be intrigued by it but there's a little bit of them that feels uncomfortable about putting that much of themselves out there I think there's probably a few definitions so like personal branding can exist online and off Like we all have personal brands with one another without being online.

21:59Like I have a personal brand with my child. My son has one with me. Like, and I suppose the act of personal branding is less about building one and more about controlling it and like working out strategically what you want the world to see you as. And so if you're trying to hire talent, if you're trying to generate, you know, VC, next round of your VC funding, if you're trying to, you know, get more customers into your business and you need brand awareness to help you do that, putting yourself out there as the founder or CEO of the business is one of the quickest routes to entry. It's also one of the lowest barriers to entry.

22:28There was a lot of noise on social media and 97 % of all social media gets absolutely no ROI. So if you want to be in that 3 % that actually produces something from the social media efforts that your team are probably getting paid a heck of a lot of money to produce, it seems reasonable to me that you would want to help them in that pursuit. And if your social media channels can help them achieve the company goals, then I think you kind of have an obligation to do that in that being said not everyone wants to stick their face in a phone like i am just like hello here i am here's my here's how many times i've fucked up today yeah um which i'm very happy to do and i've sort of built my brand off that and you know my career has evolved away from kind of being this founder creator into really being a creator now like my full-time job is consulting with big businesses and their ceos which is really fun i love it like i do it with my eyes closed but also like then creating content for the many for them to do it too and i've kind of fallen into this like little niche market which has been quite exciting and you know tbc about whether or not that's going to be successful um but one of the kind of where i was kind of going with that is one of the most successful personal brands i've ever worked on was with a founder we worked with for about 10 months um we got you know we took him from about 4 million views a month he already had a decent personal brand just for context with these figures but we took him from about 4 million views a month to about 90 million views a month in the space of four months and he was one of the most introverted quiet um reserved people definitely not shy of an opinion um definitely not afraid to say what he thinks but not comfortable on camera like that didn't really want to say stuff just for the sake of he's called it wallpaper content he's like i don't i don't want wallpaper content going out there and i'm like yeah fair i get it like i understand i'm the same sometimes i'm like i didn't pose for two and a half weeks the other week so i was like i don't want to be on linkedin just don't fancy it everyone's like where is she gone i'm like just don't fancy it guys like you know what i mean and i think that kind of comes back to my whole point here which is like we're all human and we all have things that we are comfortable with and uncomfortable with and if you want to build a brand you want to build a reputation want to build a business there is a certain element of discomfort that has to come with that you know building a brand and building a business is one of the greatest personal development journeys you will ever go on in your entire life because you are forced to find a way like even when everything falls even when everything's you know suppliers aren't paying you team members are leaving like you've got to figure it out because what else you're like what what else so if you're an introvert you can still build a really strong personal brand on social media without doing all the kind of conventional good things a personal brand does you know like i said i didn't post for two and a half weeks so i didn't feel like it none of my followers left in fact i've made more money this week than i had done the last three weeks prior to that so yeah i think you've got to find your way do it your way like look look at the pre-validated ideas of what tends to work which is you know work out what your audience cares about talk about that depending on what goals you have and then kind of find your own rhythm find your own flow and that's what makes it personal too and not just like another personal linkedin just saying stuff yeah is there an audit that you'd recommend people could do to evaluate their personal brand god like all these technical words i think there's i think there's probably a few things first and foremost do you like your personal brand like does it excite you like one of my pre-requisites before we post any content is like would i share it yeah like fine it's getting posted on my feed but would i reshare it if someone else was posting it yeah and if the answer is no then i'm like well it's not getting posted i i annoy hannah's outside um very sweetly getting bts for our um our social channels but i routinely archive stuff that she spent ages on and I know that's a very probably harsh thing to say but I'm like I wouldn't post that I wouldn't share it so why would I post it yeah and I think that's like that's something that's really really important um because if you don't believe in what you're saying and you're not excited about what you're saying then why do you expect anyone else to be and I often find that the stuff that I'm most like flippant and I'm just like record it get it out write it get it out always are things that do the best like whenever I overthink it and I'm like well I saw this person who's also got my audience like talk about this thing and it did really well let's see if we can do the same i'm always just like oh so boring yeah um and of course it just gets like average reactions whereas if i'm just like throw it up there like bare face no makeup eye patches on like hey guys this is what i'm thinking right now let's go yeah it always does the best because that's my it's me yeah so i suppose like there's less of like a series of questions more of like do you like your personal brand because if you don't then what's the point well i guess it also comes down to the audience can tell when you're being authentic versus chasing the algorithm a hundred percent and you know what's really interesting so there's a cohort um there's a program which has been very successful and the guy that runs it has been very very successful with his personal brand but it's a program that is called a personal brand cohort but basically teaches you how to hack the algorithm and how to go viral which is i mean i would like some of that information um but what it doesn't tell you is how to build a personal brand and interestingly i've now had three separate people come to me after paying 6 ,000 pounds for this cohort because they've gone viral.

27:33Some of them have as many followers as me, but none of them can sell anything. Right. Because no one knows who they are. They just see the content. They're like, I like the content. They don't necessarily like the person. And, you know, I think that in itself is so important. Algorithms change all the time. Social media change all the time. We might wake up tomorrow and there's no such thing as meta. Do you know what I mean? Like, who knows? I'm not saying it. Thank please, God. I just spent loads of money on ads. But, you know, it might happen. So if you're only chasing algorithms and you never actually build a brand, like I know that if I shut down all of my social media tomorrow, people would come and find me.

28:11They would come to my channel and I could create my own platform, which I have. I've got a website and I've got a newsletter. I could create that and I know people would come to it because they already do. I am not owned by anyone. In fact, I own my own media. and that to me is the difference between followers and a personal brand like people know who I am like I'm speaking to you guys because you know who I do you know who I am but you know who I am and that's because I talk about stuff and I'm real and it's me and it's my style and some people might like it some people might like it it's you know it is what it is but they know who I am I'm not chasing stuff to get likes I'm chasing stuff to get a depth of engagement from a specific group of people right and that's really the difference between personal branding and engagement hacking yeah because i mean that's the other thing right you could get 4 000 reactions to a post you've put up but i think most people would say they'd rather get 20 but those 20 people buy from you you know what i mean there's there's almost say that josh but most people don't then actually measure how many people have bought from you and this is the thing that i really struggle with again with with cohorts and courses and all this kind of stuff it's all measured on how many likes you get it's all measured on how much you know even i love gary vita pieces he is he's a fantastic man but amazing business amazing pastor brand but even he says day trade attention it's like attention's not the goal like money's the goal we live in a like i am running a business i don't care if you like my content unless you buy from me like i don't care or unless if you're in some funnel of mine right yeah and you know and this is this is the the most exciting i guess true statement ever this and proof of what i've just said we launched a course last week and we had a month launch goal so like the four weeks post launch we were like this is the revenue target we need to hit for this to have been a success and like we've nailed it we hit that revenue target 14 hours after we launched and that's because people know me and they were like we love you so much we're so bought into what you're doing of course we're gonna we'll just buy whatever you're selling yeah and then people actually watched the course like immediately and then And we were getting a feedback loop straight away from people being like, that was the best£79 I've ever spent.

30:21And that's because I have a personal brand. If I was just someone who had loads of followers and I was like, I'm doing a course, guys, on how to get loads of followers. Like, there's a bazillion people who know how to do that. But people know that I have built a brand that has fed my business. I'm not just building a brand to have followers. I've built a brand that has fed my business. And I think that's where I've got the respect level from other founders and, you know, why I'm speaking to you guys. And I'm one of the community who has learned a skill that a lot of founders don't know even where to start.

30:50And I'm like, take it, guys. I'm not here trying to charge you an obscene amount of money because I actually wish when I was you six years ago, just getting started, that someone was like, no, no, this is how you do it. Because it would have saved me a heck of a lot of time and stress and whatever. And like most business owners don't have thousands of pounds to spend on an agency or a cohort or whatever. Like, we're just like realistically, even if you're going for funding or you're scaling, whatever, like the budget for marketing is not like infinite. There is a certain level. And even now, personal branding is becoming more and more mainstream.

31:19It still doesn't have a budget line in your P &L. So if I can give that back to you and be like, right, make your sister team watch this, watch this and you'll figure it out. Then I think that's an amazing thing. Absolutely. What would you say is the relationship between a leader, CEO, founders, personal brand and that of their business? Sisters not twins or cousins not twins maybe. I see it a lot both in the practical sense of, you know, we'll work with big companies, you know, Fortune 500 and FTSE 250 companies. and they'll post something on the company social page and then they'll get the CEO to post the same thing on their company page and then be like, oh, we did quite well.

32:01And I'm like, great, but we're not expecting to see company branding content from the CEO. We're expecting to see thoughts and feelings about what's happening in the company from the CEO. And what I think a lot of people don't necessarily consider and certainly in-house marketing wants to do, but is often blocked by senior leadership who don't really understand it or budget holders who don't really understand it is that your CEO, your top table, whether it's CEO, CRO, CMO, whoever's in that C-suite is the top of your distribution funnel. Like that they are the ones and so are your employees too, but they are the ones who are going to get over 500 % more reach than the company brand as individuals, right?

32:38So when you have five of them or 10 of them, it's like, wow, like you're now talking very, very big numbers. So to not to totally ignore that and just spend all this money and time and effort and resource just on company pages is actually very short-sighted and the reason why companies do it and i understand the thought process like historically it's i mean it's very old age but i get it people when they post content on a platform like linkedin are perceived to be looking for a job because it used to be a job board yeah and so a lot of ceos don't understand actually that it's now a social media platform and most people go to linkedin who are in business of any kind to find out information connect with people like learn about new businesses learn about new suppliers I found new suppliers on there recently.

33:20Like, you know, I do the majority of my sense tracking on LinkedIn before I sign something or whatever. And equally, you know, if I when I just first met you, Josh, I looked used to LinkedIn straight away. Like I wanted to know a bit more about you before I said yes to, you know, the interview that we did a few months ago. So it's like LinkedIn is not a job board anymore. It is a business hub. There's a billion users. so to not include the people who have the the biggest access to those people in your marketing strategy is just really dumb like it's just it's really stupid and i understand from a board level perspective the hesitance hesitancy still wants to do it because they're like well you know it's not just us it's a company it's a team effort and all this kind of stuff but talk about the team then like talk about that off site you had last quarter and like why you took over into miami and like why it's really interesting talk about the fact that you just had this new innovation and Like, you can't wait to share it.

34:16Talk about the fact that you had a huge mistake last year and this is what it cost a bit. Like, talk about it. Because when you look at, like, the most well-known CEOs, if you like, like, for lack of a better example, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Sarah Blakely, you know, those types of people who are billionaires, who have big brands, they all share the real-time updates. Like, they are on camera. Like, Zuckerberg's like, they're like, this is what we're doing with Meta right now. like he's out here you know taking pictures of themselves at UFC fights being like here's how I spend my weekend my wife just turned 40 here's the car I bought her like and so it makes him human and it takes the business from being this scary corporate like you know you must get past the guards like before you come in yeah to being a a collection of human beings which then makes you a lot more profitable because people buy from people.

35:11Like, it's the most old age statement, but it's why, like, our grandfathers would do business on the golf course and probably many people still do. It's why, like, you'd have your... My granddad used to host dinner parties with my grandma for, like, their suppliers. He'd be like, come to our house before we sign the deal and, like, meet my family. Because you want to do business you can trust, people you can trust with. You want to work for people you trust. You want to employ people you trust. So the easiest way to do that is to do it through people, surely. You mentioned it very briefly there, but there's a lot of people who still flinch a little bit when their employees are quite loud or have quite a good built up their own following.

35:48But a lot of people see that as a threat, but you kind of argue it's not a threat. It's actually a missed opportunity if you're not encouraging that within your employees. Individuals within the business get 561 % more reach on LinkedIn than the company. LinkedIn ranks members content above company updates and sponsored ads, which is why when you share something, it will get a lot more reactions than a business insider share. Like it's just how it goes. Also, LinkedIn's still playing around with monetization. They haven't nailed it yet. So you can't really buy those eyeballs. It's still very organic, like the platform.

36:18The problem with, I think, what you've just said there is employers do see their employees' personal brands as a threat, not as an opportunity. and actually when you factor in the number of eyeballs more that they get and factor in the fact that linkedin creates more b2b leads than any other channel like all together so you know twitter um i refuse to call it x um tiktok etc combined linkedin still produces more than that and the fact that individuals like leads produced by individuals personal brands whether it's in person or online convert seven times more frequently than any other channel like this idea that we can't encourage our team to post because then they might leave is foolish because they're going to leave anyway so you may as well get the most profit and the most extraction out of that resource while they're with you and also empower them to do something for themselves like perceived thing to do for themselves instead of just being like no no here's our social media policy you can't do that yeah like i think the businesses that are really winning right now which you know you can see from just like looking at linkedin like gymshark for example tala they have a foundational empowerment of all of their team to be like we know you're not going to be here forever post about it you've just joined the team as an intern post about it everyone posts from the top to the bottom and it's instilled in the culture of that business and it's unsurprising that they are now multi-billion pound activewear brand when no one could penetrate that space for like what two decades it was just adidas nike puma like no one was getting in and now gymshark's like knock knock here we are and that's not just because it's it's they create good products they create okay products no offense but they they have a culture of people like the whole company is represented by people and that's something that nike and all of those other brands spend billions of dollars trying to do they work with like all of these massive athletes and like pay them millions of dollars and Gymshark is like here's our intern yeah exactly I mean it's right under your nose right under your nose so why and those people are really bought into that brand and probably lift and probably are exercising anyway so why wouldn't you pick the mirror up to exactly who your audience is and then put it back out them which is what your team are so yeah absolutely is there an example of a client transformation that surprised even you when I first started the agency clout we um were drafted in by sky bet we've done a bit of work with flutter group actually over the years but the first thing that we did with them with skype with sky bet and the board at the time were very reluctant right to post on linkedin um and i'd you know i'd kind of worked with the the then um uh kind of talent director clive smart who i highly recommend you go and follow him on linkedin he is and if you're looking for a people person go and hire him because he's absolutely exceptional okay um i know one of he took one of the best posts he ever did actually because i follow everyone after i've worked with them was that um he conducts um like performance review meetings on cycling okay so instead of having them in an office setting he'll like everyone in his team rides bikes because they all live in in and around yorkshire the dales you know etc so they just go for cycling meetings and i've only got like half a million views i was like i'm so proud of you for sharing that in his lycra you know shout out the five that's fantastic but no they brought us in to kind of educate we did it in two parts we educated the the board on why it was important to the team they were going on this big drive of talent because they're one of the biggest employees in the north but they really struggle to compete with digital agencies and leads because digital agencies are sexier like you know even though skyback can pay more um they're not perceived to be as sexy as working for one of these agencies and they're kind of fighting these agency for performance talent and tech talent because essentially they're a gambling company but they're a tech business and then you've got that secondary thing of like a lot of companies have this a lot of people have this perception of gambling companies being like these evil whatever and so they've got they're up against it really when it comes to hiring good talent to the business so they brought me in to basically tell kind of run through what was going to happen with the senior leadership team or executive leadership team and then sort of work alongside them and their internal teams to execute content and i remember within five minutes of me could have you know introducing myself to the board um there was a guy i forget his name um i can see his face i can see his linkedin profile in my head he was the chief uh technology officer and he said i just rick that was his name he said that i don't want to waste your time amelia but just so you know if i'm on my phone it's because i don't really believe in any of this stuff um and it's going to be very unlikely you're gonna get me post a piece of content and this is i'm this is like right at the beginning of my business oh my gosh it's my first big client yeah and i was like shit um and by the end of our work together not only was he like you've convinced me but he actually was the most prolific poster and went on to do speaking gigs and like all this kind of stuff so that was one of the biggest wins for me because he went in there like who is this person like and what what is this blonde doing telling me what i should be doing with my life on linkedin to actually being like really bought into what we were doing and saw the benefit of it and went on and actually built a brand off linkedin as well like by doing public speaking and things so i thought that was very very cool and interestingly within 30 days of us doing that program with them they increased their careers page page visits by 100 percent month on month and that was just by five people posting content so there was no ad spend there was no like you know crazy marketing strategy it was just like you guys post twice a week all of you one about shit tech team update one about your thoughts on leadership that's it and that was that was what we did and so there was what was that 15 posts 15 posts that do 100 month a month increase it's incredible yeah no that's great and a lot of ideas um we have kind of touched on it a little bit but i guess i just one asked is the following what does success look like when it comes to building your personal brand i think it depends on what you think success looks like i everyone has different goals so when i first started building my personal brand it was just about like getting the postal i was like let me just get the confidence to share what i'm working on and then it became let me use this to get clients for my business and then it became let me use this to get speaking gigs and podcast invites and a book deal and all that kind of stuff and now it's kind of like for me it's this is going to sound really i don't know if this sounds like really voyeuristic and like arrogant or whether actually i i am like some kind of new age mel robbins or something but i i deeply deeply deeply deeply deeply deeply want to help me six years ago because she had no idea what she was doing she still was carrying that wound from starting that business that failed was just kind of fucking around and sort of figuring it out and i've learned a lot in that six-year period and i'm not an expert in everything in business god lord knows but i do know a lot about branding and i do know a lot about marketing and sales and it's interesting that i said marketing and sales but that's because that's what most companies do they split it and now they're the same thing marketing enables sales and if it's not enabling sales then it's not marketing right um and that for me is sort of I guess my goal now is like I want to be known for marketing and sales and branding within the small to medium-sized kind of business community and therefore what does success look like for me well it's looking at audience profile it's looking at how quickly my followers are growing in specifically that audience it's looking at whether or not specific things are leading to specific outcomes so for example when we post about the course does it actually lead to purchases when we send an email does it actually lead to purchases and like that for me is so much more interesting and also selfishly is then playbooks i can then feed back out to the ecosystem being like we launched and we hit our monthly revenue target within 14 hours here's how we did it and like that for me is my goal i'd love to do presenting i'd love to do documentary making like that's my bigger overarching kind of thing so my goals are very very different to say yours or yours or you know anyone listening to this trying to grow a business or get investment, like your goal will be to find investors or to get more clients or to get more customers.

44:31And I think a big part of, and I go into it in the book, a big part of the chapter around why and goals is like, what are you aiming for? Because if you don't know what you're aiming for, how the hell do you measure the success of it? And if it's just likes, then my God, please dream bigger. Yeah, absolutely. What's next for you then personally and professionally over the next few years? I would really love to start a podcast. I've had a podcast in the past it did pretty well but I feel like I'm in a very different space now and I've got I'm much better at broadcasting I'm much better at interviewing I'm much better at kind of just like saying what I think and not kind of thinking oh is someone gonna judge me for that I'm just like whatever judge me who can't your judgment pays my bills so I'd love to do a podcast and that is hopefully going to be in the works in the not too distant future and I'd love to I've said it loosely there but I really want to own my own media and do presenting and be on TV and almost be like, I feel like I'm on the other side of the ridge of the embarrassment mountain, right?

45:35Where I'm like, nothing embarrasses me now. Like I will walk down this road right now in the middle of central London with my phone out, pouring with rain, just be like, right, I just did a podcast. And people will look at me and they'll be like, another influencer. I don't care. I don't. You know why? Because by me posting that, I'm making money. By you judging me, that's free yes exactly so i don't care and i feel like my broader mission outside of my skill set being more in kind of like sales and marketing whatever is actually like just fucking do it like i talk about these big red button moments like we all have big red button moments and we all have opportunities where we can choose to be judged and choose to be embarrassed and choose whatever most of us don't take them and most of us would be 99 more successful if we just stopped caring what other people think yeah and that for me is a much bigger mission that i'm going to be trying to pursue over the next kind of six to twelve months i guess amelia you've been so kind with your time thank you so much if people want to find out a little bit more about you in this lovely course you've been talking about where do people find you amelia sordell.com is where i live most days and yeah on all social media channels as well i'm fortunate to have my own great personal the branding hack is like choose a name or marry into a name that no one else has.

46:51It means that you can get that domain name and your email address so easily. But you have Amelia Sordell on all channels. You're one of one. Great. Thank you very much. Thank you so much. The Business Leader Summit 2026 is set to be bigger, bolder and more ambitious than ever. Don't just watch Britain's growth story unfold. Be part of it. Secure your ticket today by visiting the events section of the Business Leader website and using the code BLPODCAST, all uppercase. It's your chance to join the leaders who are shaping the future of business.