S07.EP07 - Founder Branding with Amelia Sordell

0:00You have to be willing to suck at something in order to be great at it. And the problem is most people aren't willing to suck because they're worried about what other people are going to think about them. They're worried about the opinion of strangers that they're never going to meet online. They worry that their friends are going to make fun of them.

0:18Hello and welcome to Just Branding. The only podcast dedicated to helping designers and entrepreneurs grow brands. Here are your hosts, Jacob Cass and Matt Davies.

0:58and are ready to scale with structure, support, and serious momentum, head over to joinbba.com and get on the wait list. That's joinbba.com. Hi, folks. Welcome back to another episode of Just Branding. I'm so thrilled. You guys are going to love this episode because traditionally, Brand Builders is focused very much on products and companies and basically building propositions to help those things flourish and grow. But recently, headed up by our guest who we have on the show now, who I'll introduce very, very shortly, there's been a slight shift in one area, and that is in the area of founder-led brand building.

1:38And we're really, really thrilled to have Amelia Sordell with us today. Who is Amelia? If you don't know who Amelia is, frankly, you've probably been hidden under a rock because she is dominating the channels, particularly LinkedIn, which is where I think I came across you, Amelia, some, some years ago. But who is she? She is the founder of one of the best known agencies helping founders and executives build powerful personal brands. She's become known, and this was a quote that I found on the Internet, as the number one voice on founder led marketing. So, folks, this is going to be really, really exciting.

2:10She's founded Clout, which is an agency that focuses in this area, and she's been doing that for some years. She's an entrepreneur, a speaker, an investor and a bestselling author. and she's become one of the leading voices on why businesses can't rely on company branding alone anymore. Because, she says, increasingly trust is built through people, not logos. So through her work, Amelia has helped leaders turn expertise into visibility, authority and commercial growth. And that is exactly why we've got you on the show today to discuss all of those things, Amelia. Welcome. Thank you for having me.

2:45What an intro. I'm blushing. Oh, no, but honestly, it's a thrill to have you on. I think I've been following you for ages. I love your like your content when you're giving tips to people. And I think I've followed a couple of your tips myself and they've worked all every single time. So, you know, thank you for all the work you're doing out there. But let's get into it. What is branding to you and particularly founder branding? I mean, I think we all know the old adage, right? I'm not going to tell anyone to suck eggs on the Just Branding show. Everyone listening to this is going to know broadly the what we mean when we talk about branding.

3:15but it's about how people feel about you, your business, whatever it is that you're trying to brand. I quite frequently try to brand vegetables as a very tasty dish to my children, doesn't always go down as to plan, but that is what branding means. But founder-led branding or founder-led marketing, which is sort of the category that I own and talk a lot about, is about leading with the founder's story, the founder journey, or the executive story, executive journey to bring eyeballs onto the business. I think increasingly we've seen over the last couple of years, people leaning heavily towards influencer marketing, because they know that influencers have more influence over people than companies do, because companies lie.

3:57And we see that over and over and over again. It's not new news. It's why Trustpilot exists. It's why TripAdvisor exists. We don't believe brands. In fact, 92 % of us don't believe brands. We'd rather trust a stranger than a brand online. So having founders at the forefront of your marketing strategy, not just gets attention with the right people, but actually it builds trust. And that's ultimately what we're trying to do with our brands, right? That's what's going to make people pick our business over another business and make us the choice, not a choice amongst many. Love that. We're going to dive into some of that detail.

4:27But before we do, another quick question in sort of just to frame things. How did you first personally kind of get switched onto this as an area and you know what made you first realize that this was something that was really really valuable in the world do you know what matt i would love to be like i picked this out because i saw history and i knew this was gonna happen and it was all a strategic play i fell into it like most things i have in my life literally stumbled and fell and the sort of backstory was i was a recruiter inherently i'm a salesperson i through and through i love selling i love the thrill of the chase.

4:59I love closing deals. Even now I'll sit on sales calls now because it's just so fun, right? Like to get that stuff over the line, it still gives me a buzz now. I would be terrified if you sat on a sales call of one of mine. Well, do you know what, Matt? Like, I'm sorry to sidetrack. I've got my sales calls now down to 20 minutes. I can close someone in 20 minutes now because it's so like, and this is not, these aren't small contracts. These are like quite, you know, thousands and thousands of pounds, but it's a psychology, right? You understand what someone wants. You've got a solution that they want.

5:28Like you just need to pair the two up. And if you do a good enough job of it, they'll say yes at the end. So it's, yeah. Side track note to Jacob, put that in your notes, get Amelia back on we'll talk about sales. Yeah, I'd love to talk about sales. Look, the reason why I mentioned this, right, is branding, sales and marketing are the same thing. And it is hilarious to me that people love talking about them separately because they're part of the same thing. And I always find it so funny that marketing is siloed from sales, like marketing sits separately from sales, often in a separate building, separate country.

5:57Sales has a different leaderboard to marketing, have different KPIs. Like guys, like we're all on the same team. Marketing should produce sales. That's the whole point. Otherwise, what's the point of having a marketing team? I kind of kicked off my career in sales. And my first kind of proper job, if you like, was in event sales. I don't know very, very quickly that actually building relationships with the big businesses that I wanted to be building relationships with, you know, Capgemini, NatWest, you know, Bain Capital, et cetera, was to go in and actually meet these people and form sort of some kind of reputation with them and that kind of transcended into a business that I built myself which was a clothing brand like every 21 year old girl I was like oh I'm gonna be a fashion designer and when I got funding first year business was great you know we had loads of celebrities wearing our stuff we were featured in the papers all the time which back then was like the way to reach new customers and then year two lost everything but the reason I mention all of this is all of my successes whether it be you know that first job in sales my first year in business and before it kind of all went wrong or whether it be in recruitment which is where I discovered personal branding and founder-led marketing it's all been driven by money it's all been driven by how can I get my business and my product and my offering in front of the right people at the right time so that they buy what I'm selling and so how I fell into this was really just in pursuit of getting as many eyeballs as humanly possible what I was selling at the time it just so happened to be recruitment I was a recruiter I was very driven I really wanted that you know big commission check at the end of the month and very quickly in the space of about six months went from zero experience to billing about 30 grand a month which in recruitment I don't know if you're familiar with there's quite a lot of money for someone who's only kind of six months into the role and I did that through basically sharing content and DMing people on LinkedIn and so that's how it kind of all kicked off.

7:37So it came about from your personal experience out there in the wild if you like in recruitment and then you've sort of formalized that and brought that into clout is that right because I heard you started clout in the middle of the pandemic that sounds like a great time to start a business as well. I know. Yeah. Everyone said the same thing now. Like, oh, good world's in free fall. Brilliant idea to quit your safe job. Yeah. You know what it was? I deeply believe in this theory I call the deep red button moment. And I think you get like big red button moments throughout your life. And a big red button moment to me is you get given this moment where you can either press that button and blow up your life and see what happens, or you will continue to do what you're already doing and get given that red button moment again, right until you decide to actually press it and that can be in the form of you're in a crap relationship and you want to leave but you don't want to hurt that person that could be in the form of you're in a job that you don't enjoy and maybe you get fired or you get fired and you've been thinking about quitting for the last six months like these moments come to us and covid was one of those moments for me there was never going to be a time where i could max out a credit card and the company couldn't come and take my you know the the mortgage company couldn't foreclose my house you know I knew I had a three-month runway even if everything went wrong and I just thought you know what like you've got to play the game with whatever tools you can find right and those were the tools that were available to me so I quit my job I started my business and I was very fortunate to have the foresight although it wasn't actually intentional to start building my personal brand before I launched so I'd already started posting content for you know a year or two before I launched my business which meant the day that I launched my business I got like 10 inquiries and then by you know 72 hours later i'd closed my first two clients which was double what i'd been paid with my previous employer so yes it's built my business is built on real life experience we were an agency for a very long time for the you know the last six years we've been literally full service personal branding agency from every social media channel to speaker training to media training to you know speaking to people about what podcasts they should be on you know pitching our clients to people like you guys and actually it's been an interesting time to go through because when I launched cloud founder branding and personal branding was new right it was perfect timing everyone needed to be online mainly because of the situation that we were in globally but I kind of launched that business and grew very quickly like I think we got to half a million in revenue in the first like 10 months or something which is pretty spectacular and our growth kind of continued from there but what's happened in that time is Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini like these are all things have exploded and so people have absolutely had much more access to building their brand in a much cheaper, much faster, much quicker way, which has meant that lots of agencies have stumbled.

10:11You know, half of my competitors don't exist anymore, because they just haven't been able to convert the clients that they typically would have been able to convert. Because if you're charging someone three to five grand a month, you better bloody deliver. And a lot of these businesses are looking at that budget line going, well, why would we spend, you know, 60 odd grand a year with a business when we could just get, you know, one of the marketing team to do it for you. And so as we've evolved as a business, so has our offering. So we don't work actually in an agency capacity anymore we train teams on how to do it and it's been an incredible you know success story that we've had in this huge pivot of if I'm being perfectly frank like if we'd kept going the way that we were going offering the same agency model 18 months ago we wouldn't exist anymore you mentioned Matt you've seen me online I'm very honest with with stuff like I you know to a fault sometimes I've got friends that message me going like I posted something on the day on Instagram my friend was like did why did you share that it's like because I want people to know this story.

11:04You know, it's going to help someone. If there's someone sitting on their sofa looking at my content being like, yeah, damn, like she gets it. My job is done. So, you know, we've pivoted the business now. And instead of focusing on the monthly deliverables, we train, you know, businesses are doing one to 50 million a year. We train their marketing teams on how to do this for the founder. And the success that we've had has been amazing. In fact, the results have been significantly better than when we were doing this as an agency. So that's a phase two of Cloud, which is very, very exciting. And we're launching in I think four weeks like outwardly well all the best with that I mean that sounds amazing let me I want to ask you a little bit more about what your thoughts are on the theory of this if you like so if I was to ask you like why has this side of of personal branding founder-led branding become a commercial lever for businesses to kind of focus on and allocate budget to as you sort of mentioned what would you say that reason was like why is it that that's a thing well because people don't trust brands as i said like it's been an evolution if you look back over the last 10 years like influencer marketing wasn't a thing really like 15 years ago you know instagram had just really started twitter was a thing like snapchat wasn't a thing facebook was the dominant social media channel and social media wasn't really leveraged by brands it was leveraged by people to share photos of their night out last friday or tag someone in photos from their wedding like it wasn't actually a utilized channel and as we've kind of gone deeper and deeper and deeper into the social media and attention economy people now want to find products and find brands in their feed but we don't want to see a brand talking about a product like we don't want to see pictures of a product we don't want to see pictures of like this microphone i don't want to see a photo of a microphone i want to see someone using the microphone and showing me how good it is in situ like we trust people i don't trust brands i don't know if you've ever seen an advert that hasn't hasn't got a single human in it but i don't trust it unless it's of a car which is slightly different.

12:55I'm not interested in the ad if it's got no human interaction in it, because why would I trust something that hasn't got a human in it? And so there is a psychological reason as to why we now distrust brands, because we now have access to more information about the things that brands do. And so we are much more likely to do a deep dive on peer reviews before we put that holiday, or do a deep dive on Glassdoor before, although arguably Glassdoor is total rubbish, but you know, you get what I'm saying, like Trustpilot, all of these things. We look at all this stuff before we buy stuff because we trust what susan in sydney is saying about the coffee cup we're about to buy more than we care about what the actual brand says on their website and so when you take that psychology and that consumer behavior shift and look at it objectively obviously you would use the people in your business to market your product they're already on payroll like you're already paying these people there was no new budget line that needs to be created to use the influence that's already existing in your team, whether it be the founder, the assistant, the marketing manager, whoever it might be, these people are already there.

13:57So if you can get them talking about the business and talking about their journey with the business, talking about why they're here, you know, whatever it might be, you're going to reach a significantly larger portion of the market just by the fact that that's where people are going to be. They're online. People by people. I love it. Question, do you also see it just with founders, right? Because I know a lot of service-based B2B businesses, right? They know they've got to build relationships, but they really, they struggle. At least some of my clients do. You kind of get this sense that the team don't really want to, they feel uncomfortable going out and putting, building a personal brand.

14:29They don't really know what to say. The founder's not really leading from the front. They don't really know. Everybody's sort of got this like resistance. Like, so there's two questions there really. One is, is it just founder or is it the full team that should be thinking about this? And the second is, is how do you deal with sort of concerns, resistance in, in, in businesses? It should absolutely be everyone. but I also have to acknowledge that not everyone could or should build a personal brand let me rephrase that everyone has a personal brand whether you are posting content or not right like whether you are this is personal branding if I the way I you know say good morning to every single parent that walked past me on the school run this morning is part of my personal brand I have a personal brand with my kids sometimes it's a good one sometimes it's a bad one depending on what they've done right we all have a personal brand whether or not you want to use and scale that online is a personal thing right you cannot mandate to your team you must post content about our business because it's part of your job because what that will feel like is a chore and when it feels like a chore it will be crap and actually it's going to do more damage to the business and more damage that person then they actually just didn't do it at all so should everyone build a personal brand I think is actually the first question we should be asking no can everyone no you know there is a certain level of requirement like with anything everyone has potential to be an unbelievably well-known person in their space but very few people want to work hard and the problem is the price of the first is the second right so you need to be willing to do this and post this and share this and go through the highs and lows of you know going and sharing your heart's heart out on social media and getting one like for it for 50 days before anyone gives about what you have to say right so there is that barrier to entry which most people will not cross because they are a lacking confidence which we all are when we first start by the way and you don't get confident by getting confident you get confident by doing the thing and realizing you didn't die doing the thing and getting a bit better every single time right so there's that the second thing is no one wants to be embarrassed if i post 50 times i get one like on every single my photos i'm gonna think that other people think i'm stupid right so no one wants to go through that thing but the problem is you need the confidence to start no one has the confidence to start and you need an immunity to embarrassment to keep doing it and no one has that one until they've done it so actually should everyone be doing this no because no very few people can actually get past those two very simple barriers once you get over that it's really easy because if you don't give it about whether your stuff gets one like or not then of course like you're going to do well because you don't care and ironically the less you care the better it does so should it be a team-wide and a founder thing absolutely but founders should not expect their team to do this they should create a framework which is what we do with our clients and what they should be posting when they should be posting it and make it goddamn easy for them so that there is a marketing team supporting the company distribution.

17:14We used to create content plans for companies that was exclusively designed to be shared by their team. And the impressions and the kind of brand equity we won off that strategy was enormous compared to the company brand alone. No one followed the company brand, but everyone was really interested in what the team was saying about the company. And actually just flipping that on its head is a really simple distribution plan that you can put in your existing marketing plan to get your business in front of more people. What are some of the sort of obstacles and pitfalls, you know, of doing this? I think I've already mentioned them, you know, it's embarrassment, it's hard work.

17:47It's, there is a reason why very few people, like we live in this world where everyone's like an influencer, right? Everyone wants to be an influencer. The number of influencers who are actually making a lot of money influencing is very small. And that's because it's a very hard job. You've got to be doing this all day. You've to create editing, posting, scheduling all day. And most people don't want to do that because it takes a lot of effort and there's a level of embarrassment to it, right? There is a huge barrier to entry, but the best news for founders or anyone listening to this is you're not a content creator.

18:18You are an amazing person who already has existing knowledge that you can talk about. And the thing that I think is probably the biggest blocker for most founders specifically is they compare themselves to these creators and go, well, that person's got 100k followers. I should have 100k followers they've got 100 likes i just have 100 likes you're not a creator you're a founder and both of those two things are full-time jobs right so focus on the thing that you actually are which is a business owner and talk about the stuff that's happening in your business do not compare yourself to people who are doing this in a full-time job and hilariously when you stop doing that you actually start attracting the people that you're trying to sell to and you make a ton more money from the content you're actually posting because you're not trying to pretend to be someone you're not i love that do you know that's so true years ago this is going back i'm getting old now so this is probably like over 10 years ago i was a creative director in an agency in nottingham and i used to always think like i had a design team right i used to be like our work is gonna be the thing that draws people into our side of the agency i was dead against like awards public speaking podcasts not even that podcasts were a thing back then but it felt to me like bragging and i think that's quite like a i don't know there's maybe a european maybe a british thing like we're quite close oh it's very it's very british you need to promote your work like no one cares about your work unless they know about it no one like this was my attitude and then one day right there we won an award right our agency and the the ceo at the time he couldn't attend because he had to do something with his kids and he was like we were sat around this boardroom table and he's like right matt you're good at speaking we want you to go and pick up the award and give a speech i was like oh afterwards i i called him inside i was like i'm not sure i want to do that it just feels like i'm blowing up my own trumpet it's like really not me and he sat me down and he was like Matt you this is outrageous right I'd said this word I'd said I feel it's like a little bit arrogant right and he went Matt you're arrogant I was like what he was like you're arrogant because you think the universe is going to care like you were just saying there Amelia about what we're doing here in the agency without us even trying to expose himself he said you're afraid you're scared you're brilliant in what you do get out there give this speech and do it so I did it and it shifted and it was obviously you know it was quite a success And then since then, that kind of conversation flipped a little switch.

20:23It was like the thing that you were saying, like just to kind of push you over that fear barrier. Because now when I started my consultancy, I'm doing it all the time and it's been the best thing ever. Jacob, you're like the king of personal branding. Like what was there a moment in your kind of world that pushed you over those barriers that Amelia's just mentioned? The whole personal branding thing came naturally to me. I was just sharing all the time, especially it started at university. And I was just sharing my classwork online. and getting feedback and posting, sharing where I was in the journey and not being ashamed of where I was at.

20:55And definitely laugh at it now, but that's how I built an aim for myself and made connections because I was putting myself out there and have consistently done that for years. So that has paid off. Sharing is caring. You're just so nice, Jacob. You're so nice, whereas I do it for complete greed reasons. If you're serious about mastering branding and building a thriving creative business, the Brand Builders Alliance is for you. Inside, you'll get live masterclasses, mentorship from our eight resident coaches, a stacked resource vault, and a global network of brand builders who actually get it. If you're done winging it alone and are ready to scale with structure, support, and serious momentum, head over to joinbba.com and get on the wait list.

21:40That's joinbba.com. I do have a question, Amelia. So you've probably seen the video of the McDonald's CEO eating the new burger, right? And it just was so corny and forced and all these memes came out of it. That was a CEO, not necessarily a founder. What's your view on CEOs, founders, and like, not cliche, cringy things like that? I hate the word authentic because it's like, what does that even mean? You know what I mean? Like, I am not authentic to the degree that I'd be authentic with my girlfriends in the bar on a Friday night. Because if I was, I'd probably get canceled. What is authenticity?

22:19I think the thing is, it can't feel like you're doing it for the clout, for lack of a better word. Like it can't feel like you're going like, oh, like this is how amazing I am and how amazing my product is. And like, this is delicious because like people. Like the Truman Show. Yeah, yeah, exactly. People read and see through that. So should you get involved? Absolutely. And in fact, there's some great examples of, interestingly, that moment kicked off a moment for loads of other brands, right? Right. So Burger King did it. I think Pizza Hut did it like Domino. They all did it because it became this like meme.

22:49And actually they did it very authentically and it did much better as a result, obviously. So should CEOs be involved? Yeah, they've got a shareholder responsibility to represent the business. What a lot of founders and businesses don't realize is the CEO or the founder's reputation equates to 40 to 50 percent of the market value. So if you are not getting your founder or CEO to build their personal brand, it actually directly impacts the valuation of the business. and we know this from you know even in a some bad examples look at we work we work's valuation was absolutely astronomical and a big part of that was because the founder adam was so prevalent on social media and he was on stages and he was doing speaking and he was doing all of these things same thing with deliveroo right like deliveroo i don't even think on paper is actually a very successful business but it's a huge brand because they had such a heavy focus on the founders the you know founding team posting about the business talking about the business and you know we've seen this again even in history years and years and years ago before you know this whole even concept of personal branding existed like you know you've got mark benioff who founded salesforce like he's a huge personal brand and people knew who this person was and they all wanted to come to dreamland because of him and learn from him you know michael dell another great example of great personal branding steve jobs bill gates all of these people have heavily invested and don't be fooled to think that this happened by accident they have heavily invested in their personal brand and as a result have got pretty big businesses to thank for it right as you say it can go up and down right i think of like um elon musk right who like was like seen as this absolute weed smoking genius you know going to space all this stuff and then got involved in politics and then for those that weren't of his political persuasion in their minds tesla became a problem for them right even though you know they probably would be supportive of tesla's kind of ambitions so it's really really interesting to kind of think that through like it can go up and it can go down right would you say there's also a risk involved as well as benefits and i guess you've got to kind of weigh those up but what you're saying is it's better to be in control of that roller coaster ride i guess than it happened by accident would that be fair for sure i think elon musk is an interesting example because i don't think this is an accident i don't think he sits there and he just randomly tweets stuff like donald trump does like i think donald trump really does just think something and just post it whereas Elon Musk I would not be surprised whether he is posting stuff to manipulate stock markets so that he can benefit in some way right like he's a very very very smart man he is not someone who's just aligning himself with politics for the sake of it he's doing it to benefit himself or benefit a wider thing that he's working on right so I think he's probably a very niche example of someone who is up and down like a yo-yo and therefore public perception of him is up and down like a yo-yo because I think actually he's doing it on purpose but you know you can see other examples of people who suffered negatively if you like because they have either not told the full truth or maybe they've told too much of the truth and i think again you've got to you've got to look at this from the lens of is this going to benefit the long-term strategy of the business and that's what i look through all of my content through that lens and everything that i do so you're doing podcasts doing speaking gigs i do pretty much everything for free to the benefit of my business if i don't think someone's going to benefit my business even if it's paid i won't do it because it needs to benefit the long-term thing and that's why i'm having this conversation with you if i didn't do that and if i wasn't very steadfast in the guardrails of what i will and won't talk about it's unlikely i would be you know speaking on podcasts and stages as much as i am right one thing that i i wanted to mention to you was this idea of like your audience right knowing your audience like because you've mentioned they're adding value to your audience and making sure you show up for them and making sure that they're connected with what you're saying and one one thing i always find fascinating like because i do a lot of kind of content and stuff and my audience tends to be like CEO and business leaders and managing directors.

26:29And what I find is that they don't like my content. Like they're not going to go on LinkedIn and go, wow, Matt, that's amazing. You've been to Prague last week. Hope you had a good trip. That's just not their vibe. But if I'm in a business meeting this week, no doubt someone's going to say to me, Matt, saw you went to Prague. How did it go? And they're only going to know I went to Prague because they're kind of digesting my content via LinkedIn. And so I kind of wanted to ask you about this idea of lurkers, right? Like a lot of my audience are lurkers, which is incredibly frustrating, right? Because I know they're watching it and I know they're reading it and digesting it.

27:00But I don't know until the real world experience when they connect with me on a real world basis. What's your view on kind of knowing your audience? And, you know, what would you say around this idea of an audience that lurks but doesn't connect? So I think about audiences in two buckets. You've got community and you've got customers. Your community, the people that engage with your staff, they're really interested in what you have to say. They'll like it. They're the ones that tag you and things going, oh, you'd be great for this, Matt and Jacob. But they're never going to buy your stuff, right, ever because they can't afford it.

27:28And then you've got your customer and your customer sees your community engaging with your content and therefore believes that you are good at what you do because you have all of these people who are interested in what you're doing. And so you have to create content for both of these people, otherwise you don't get anything. And that's, I think, the mistake that a lot of people make is like they say, my ideal audiences are neurosurgeons. And therefore, I'm going to create exclusively very technical content for neurosurgeons. but maybe their community is actually other medical professionals and so they completely alienate the people that are actually going to give them the credibility to those neurosurgeons because they're not actually thinking about the broader picture you have to kind of think about this if you are going to do this strategically i don't love over complicating this particularly when people start first start out i think it's a nice way to frame it the easy way to do it is tell people what you're doing which is going to get your community interested in you know your example there as you were you're in prague um tell people what you're doing what you're up to oh i've just had this conversation this week this was really interesting oh here's me with the team and then you create content for your customer which is i'm so proud of the team for this incredible project they just delivered like we just got 15 our 15 time row ass for this client working on this project like that's actually going to convert your customers into a lead and interestingly the content that gets the most engagement is rarely the content that actually gets you leads it's the content that gets the least engagement but is very very specific to the audience that you're trying to convert is the stuff that normally gets you the lead so that's why you know for both reasons measuring the performance of your personal brand or your metrics vanity metrics alone is a really dumb thing to do just like you would do with your brand you wouldn't measure the impact of your brand on vanity metrics alone you'd impact the measurement of your brand on you know lifetime value of a customer like how they found you how long they stayed with you you know you've got to think of it from a perspective of capturing of customers and creation of customers if you think about it from an advertising perspective brand creates new customers advertising converts ones that probably would have already converted and you need to think about your past around the same way like what can you post it's going to get your brand everywhere it's rarely going to be the very intrinsic detail of the day-to-day things that you're doing for clients it's probably more likely to be the trip to Prague the fact that I stayed home this morning and did this podcast it's you know I did the school run this morning and dropped my coffee and like what happened next that's actually what's going to get my name into rooms I've been oh I saw this woman Amelia talking about this thing it was really interesting um you know thought you'd be interested that's how you build your brand the way you capture the customer is actually by talking about the results that you've had.

29:47Love that. Love that. Yeah, Amelia, you mentioned mistakes as well. So that was one mistake. So are there any other mistakes that you see founders make when they're like starting this journey that people should be aware of? Yeah. Like there's this weird thing. I think it's an ego thing, right? And like, I can be very honest about that. There's this weird ego thing, just like you were saying about your old boss saying you're arrogant, Matt, that there is this ego thing that like, oh, I'm being too visible. Like people are going to think I'm really arrogant and I shouldn't be posting five times a week because like I've never posted before it's like who do you think you are no one gives a shit about you you have to be in their face every day what is wrong with you there is a reason why you pick a specific brand of product whether it be a water bottle or you know a type of camera or the fact that I have a certain type of computer there's a reason why I pick that and it's because they're in my face every single day which makes them an option that I can't not choose if you think you're so amazing that people are going to give about you when you're not in their feed or you're not in their face like I can't help you so I think that's a really really big mistake and I love Jacob how honest you were about being like yeah I just came really naturally to just post I think you're probably in a very small minority of people who are just like let me just f*** around and find out most people are like oh but you know what if people think this thing and I post something and I get one like and everyone thinks I'm stupid like you know and it's a huge barrier for them and the other thing is they're like they're not honest enough the stuff they want to share is like just very drab boring stuff you know I've got a uh a bit of a checklist that I run through with my content.

31:13And it's a lot of my content actually recently has failed this checklist. We're going through a bit of a transition at the minute. So I've started deleting posts because I'm like, don't believe that. Don't believe that. It's not good enough, not good enough. And the checklist is what's the point? If we're sharing this, why are we sharing it? What is the thing that you want people to take away from this? Because otherwise it's just wallpaper, right? It's not, you're not giving anyone anything. You need to give people something for them to engage, whether it's a laugh, whether it's entertainment, whether it's information, whether it's joy, inspiration, motivation, you've got to give them something the second thing is who are you to say it like what can you say about this thing that no one else can say and it could be really simple like i love this stanley cup right anyone could say that but if i say i love this stanley cup because i rarely drink enough water and actually when i have this massive bottle that makes me drink enough so that my skin actually stays hydrated it's honestly changed my life that's now something only i can say because that's the exact reason why i bought this thing so having a think about like if you're gonna have an opinion about something it doesn't matter whether millions of other people have that opinion why do you have that opinion is actually really important and then the final thing is like just make sure you're only saying what is necessary you don't need to fluff everything out you don't need to have some big build-up to the story you know I see people do this all the time they'll say a couple of lines on a LinkedIn post or a video or whatever to build up to the point of the video and it's like are you so arrogant that you believe someone's going to sit there and read or listen to something for seven seconds before you tell them actually what you're trying to say you've lost the room the same thing would happen in a meeting if you want to say something in a meeting you stick your hand up you're not going to be like well you know put my hand up because i was listening to all of you talk and then this thing happened you just be like this is my opinion so you've got to get straight to the point because people's attention is the most valuable thing they have and you need to earn that with every single thing that you do and say and post and share so if that is the prerequisite get to the point because people are busy so those are the three things that i would say and that works for everything it works for emails like you guys have probably noticed in my communication, I don't go, hi, how are you?

33:09I'm like, I'm late. I'll see you in 15 minutes. Like I get straight to the point because you're busy. It's not because I'm trying to be direct. It's because I'm busy. You're busy. So why am I going to waste everyone's time? Just give me information. Yeah. I'm respecting your time by just getting to the point. And you've got to see content the same way. Like just get to the point, just say the thing and then move on. And also there's a lot of other thing here, which is a bit off piste, but I think is helpful. You don't have to be intelligent for it to be really valuable. I think there is this massive barrier to entry for people because they feel like particularly on LinkedIn right which is where a lot of your audience is going to be sitting right now you know if they're trying to build businesses or they're an executive like that's going to be the natural platform to be on you don't have to write an essay sometimes the best content's like four lines make the barrier to entry super low don't make it really complicated don't sit there and think oh I need to have this amazing video set up to get some videos just whack your phone out like do a voice note screenshot something and be like I read this article today and here's what I thought about it like make it so low it's almost like a diary entry like it's so ridiculously low for you to do it that it's easy to do and this is a mistake a lot of people make is they think that oh i need to have it all planned out and scheduled and perfect whatever it's like just chuck it out there and see what happens learn what works and then make longer content about the stuff that works that that's a really easy way to work this out and everyone talks about optimization and you know benchmarking like do that it's so easy like if you could write five lines about something and those five lines do really well you can then write a longer piece that's a bit more in depth about it in the future but you've already tested that it works so you don't have to spend all that time up front for something to then get no reactions or no likes or no shares or no results right so just keep it easy for yourself thank goodness you don't have to be intelligent to post otherwise no i mean look i wouldn't post anything to be quite quite i'm probably the least intelligent person of all of my friendship group but yeah somehow i've managed to build a business so you know like just make it easy for yourself and this is the thing right we all compare ourselves to really smart intelligent successful people because they've got something we don't in actuality they are probably exactly the same as you if not less of all of those things than you but they just gave it a go like that's the difference there is no difference between you me jacob matt elon musk all of these people there's no difference the difference is they just give stuff a go and because they've given stuff a go they've learned more stuff than we've been able to learn because we're less curious right so just give it a go and see what happens why not you're gonna die anyway i often find there's like two principles that i try and stick to and that is like show yourself in action and demonstrate your value i think i've spoken on this podcast about this before but like they're the two that kind of guide me when i'm trying to post and again like you were saying amelia sometimes you break your rules occasionally but you know i think if you're showing yourself in action like speaking doing a workshop consulting traveling whatever it might be but then you add some value right you've got to add like you were saying before show up for your audience in a way that gives them a thought inspires them educates them in some way that's they're the two jacob do you have anything that kind of guides you in your sort of posts and stuff nope you are so weird my friend that's why jacob's got such a successful personal brand yeah think about it yeah and this is my point like the less you care the better it does i'm going to challenge you a little bit though Matt like value is like it or like the word authenticity is totally subjective and when people hear the word value they think that you need to give people a white paper right memes are valuable like I laugh at a meme therefore it is valuable so like I said you don't have to be intelligent for it to be valuable it just has to be something that someone's going to go huh or huh like you know you need to get a reaction from them that's actually the definition of value in my opinion no no I'd agree with that I like that thank you thank this is this is what this podcast all about getting tips all the time all the way through so that's great okay well look um just another quick question like in terms of where we're going with this where should the founder brand show up versus the company brand like have you got any kind of thoughts like would you treat them completely differently are they connected at all how does that kind of work in your world so for me they're sisters not twins and i think that's a really important distinction to make so stuff that's coming out on the company brand should be about the company it should be about the people in the company, what's going on in the company.

37:16You know, it's a company brand. The founder stuff should be from the founder's perspective. So for example, if you have just released a new product and you've done a big product launch on your company brand, everyone's really excited about it. You would then talk about it from the founder's perspective being like, my team have been working on this product for 12 months. I'm so proud of them today. It's finally here. Here are some of the things like, this is what I'm thinking about it. This is why we built this new product. Like it's almost like the behind the scenes, right? You know, when you watch a movie like back in the day if you sat long enough in the in the cinema you would see the edits that didn't make it to the film in the end right if you've got to think about your company brand as like the final cut and then the behind the scenes bit is actually what everyone wants to wait to see right so the founder and the executive is the behind the scenes of all the messiness all the reality all the stuff that actually shouldn't be shared on the company brand because the company brand needs to appear to be trustworthy and is obviously held on a much higher pedestal than a person right because it's a company but the founder can be a lot more honest a lot more simple a lot more reflective about things that have happened and gone wrong and gone right and all of these things as a person and actually that distribution of what that content will get is significantly more than probably the product launch and will drive all of that traffic to that product launch an example of this is you know grace beverly founder of tala they sold a million pounds in like two hours or something because she'd been posting this journey about how she couldn't find a puffer coat that fit properly and it was either too long or too short it wasn't made for boobs or maybe there wasn't there was too much room like she did this whole thing about it for months and then she was like we've launched a coat here's why we did it i'm so excited about it because of these three reasons like i'm so proud of the team but sold out in like two hours and they made a million quid and that's not because tarla was like we have a coat it was like it's because the founder had been talking talking and talking and talking and talking talking about as a founder why they invented this particular product so that's a great example of someone who is is absolutely nailed it's a story if you come along with the the process you are emotionally connected with the story and it means more than just here's a product buy it because yeah it's drip it's drip feeding you know it's drip feeding we all want stuff that we can't get yet right so i always use dating as the example like there'll be that person when you were younger you really fancied and they were in a relationship but you'd make that almost made you fancy them more like it's the same thing like you can't have it yet we're thinking about it we're building you can't have it yet we're thinking about it we're building it like it creates this level of curiosity that when you drop it people are like oh my god and there's like an urgency to get it because they've been so invested in the process of building it for so long and that's a tactic obviously that's used in urgency is a sales tactic you build at the end of my sales call every single time i say we only work with a capped number of founders like so how does all this sound you want to move forward and so people are like oh how many founders do you work with we're like seven and we're on six souls so you can either take it or leave it and it gives people a move like it makes them move so it's a similar tactic that's used in in the play that i just mentioned

40:16i think the other thing with what you said is like it kind of builds a relationship with that person and with the thing the product that they're gonna eventually potentially bring and that sort of leads on to another question because we're living in a world of ai right ai is everywhere obviously it's the buzzword of last year and you know obviously it's moved into this year. Ford is my hardest working colleague. Yeah, right, right. Well, I was going to ask you about that because I guess the thing, we've been having a lot of conversations recently about like, well, how do we navigate the wave of AI that is here and is coming?

40:48You know, how do we stay relevant in a world that's basically generated by robots? And it's entered the kind of content building space. And I'm like so annoyed all the time with the AI. You can start spotting it now straight away like ai generated tosh but the thing is is like it can't build relationships can it and authenticity and be showing up day after day over years on social media is a way that differentiates you from say a plastic person who's just kind of putting dripify content out connected to claude like it seems to me like being real being out there is a real kind of way that we as how to deal with AI and making sure that we are relevant and human in that kind of upcoming wave of robotics that's coming?

41:31I love AI. It has changed my life. So I have a team of four people. We used to have a team of 17 and I can get done now more than I could get done when I had the team of 17 people because I've got so many agents doing so many different things. I have an agent that skims all of my content like autonomously from the last like three months and goes these are the topics actually that resonated most with your ideal audience because it looks at audience profile and it looks at the content so then I just make more content about those things so I used to manually have to do that social media managers have to go through and be like and obviously mistakes get made there because you're looking at it from a biased perspective so I love AI it's brilliant I don't use AI to write my content though and I have tried that and I'll be perfectly honest with you and I've had varying degrees of success but the one thing that I would say is the ones that did really well were basically just reworked stories that had already done well for me and so there is this thing of if you're going to use ai and it's going to work well which it can do with content absolutely you but you better have about 5 000 posts that have already gone out because otherwise it will sound like chat gpt because who knew robots had a tone of voice right it won't sound like you and it's missing those three things that i mentioned earlier which is like what's the point why can only you say this and getting to the point really fast like ai tends to learn what other people have posted to present back to you in formats and in styles and in writing styles, right?

42:50And if everyone else is using the same tool to create their content, it's only going to keep producing the same type of content, which is why it all looks the same, because it's all learning from itself and then reproducing the same content. So no, I don't think using AI to write your post is a good idea. I think using AI to learn what does well, to be inspired by other people's content, to feed you autonomously, articles to comment on and what's happening in the world and give you something to bounce off, something to be inspired by every single week is absolutely a great use of it. I think using AI to reply to your DMs, I think using AI to reply to your comments if they're trying to ask for a product or a link to something or, you know, do all that you don't want to do or you don't want to pay someone to do.

43:31That's what AI is for. But creating content, how are you going to create content using a robot that then someone else is going to use AI to reply to that content? You're not, you miss the whole point of branding. The whole point of branding is to make people feel something. So no, don't use it to create your content and absolutely invest heavily in in real life brand building too right one of the reasons why i love doing stuff like this is i now know you guys and it may well come a time where i have a client for you you might have a client for me maybe jacob you'll be in the uk and i can be like oh i'm from sydney you're from sydney like that i'll take you to the best coffee in london because no one does coffee better than australia right like even the italians as far as i'm concerned um i'm gonna get shot for saying that but melbourne best coffee in the world so i'll take you there but like doing this has allowed us to form that relationship so don't think of this is just an online how can I shortcut this exercise like use AI for the things that you don't need to do like scheduling all of that kind of stuff and use your brain and your stories and what you're up to to actually make human connection because the best thing is about AI is everyone's using it right which means that the barrier to actually posting content has dropped dramatically which means there's loads more content but it also means there's loads more crap content because it's all made using AI so if you're someone who's actually just off the cuff sharing stuff immediately you're going to do significantly better than everyone else love that and i also feel like what you said is so true and in in regards to before you said something about like make the barrier to posting right really low really low yeah and using ai to do that feels very complicated because then you have to go with the idea and then go back and just share it just go but also i kind of feel like a lot of people want to be perfectionists particularly some of our audience who are like designers like they're very worried that like you were saying that that fear of looking silly or something and And I always kind of think, well, like, for example, I did a post the other day and it had like a spelling mistake in it.

45:14I'm slightly dyslexic, right? Surprise. And someone messaged me like, oh, Matt, you know, you've made this mistake or whatever. So I messaged back, said, thank you. I corrected it. And I said, and then my comment was, at least you know that that wasn't generated by AI, right? And they were like, so true. Like, that's why I love your content. And it was kind of like, oh, yeah, you know, we're so in this polished world of everything being perfect. And it got me thinking, like, do you remember back in the day, like Hollywood obviously is known for polishing all the movies and it being beautiful. but I don't know if you remember there was a film that came out called the Blair Witch Project do you remember that and it was basically some bloke with a handheld camera right just did this whole video like I think it was like you know and it was just really rickety and shaky and terrifying right and it won loads of awards and it was like super successful and I think it's because it was in stark contrast to the perfectionism that started to come from Hollywood and now shaky cameras is all part of the technique of filming and I always wonder like do you think like that really authentic content is a good sort of strategy to kind of think through a little bit grainy a little bit shaky camera iphone scenario rather than everything polished and perfect with lighting and stuff what are your thoughts on rough and ready content getting it out there my experience with posting stuff is that my least produced content always does the best like anytime i've done scripted stuff or it's been really polished and whatever it's just never really done well when i just off the cuff say stuff in my phone in my car on the way to the school run or i get clipped up doing stuff like this it's like very authentic and very off the cuff and like we're not thinking about the hook and like how it ends and like how long it is and all this kind of stuff always does better always um so yeah i think um let me start again sorry you can edit that bit edit my cough out so i'm not uh coughing in people's no you said it's no edits well i did fine keep it in i did say at the start like don't worry about editing we save the time so i apologize in advance if you hear any coughing and croaking i've had putting all the coughs in this is it we'll clip all the coughs and just have that as the bloopers real cool i mean we're coming towards sort of the end the end now i was just kind of thinking we've got a quick fire round uh shortly to get through real quick because i know you're gonna enjoy that but in terms of like that question around being performative right how do you take that out of it because you you're quite comfortable speaking off the cuff for example a lot of people will get really nervous they get blocked the fear kind of creeps in like how do you kind of help people overcome some of that inertia like and get moving forward look i i think confidence is this sort of ethereal thing that evades all of us you know like i think one of the most searched terms on youtube is like confidence tips how to get confident how to do something when you're gonna like and people really are desperate for all the answers and the answer is pretty simple which is you just got to do it you know like there's a reason why you would rather have a surgeon who's done 10 ,000 surgeries than a surgeon who's done one and that's because they've done 10 ,000 surgeries more and therefore probably much better of a surgeon than when they first did the one surgery and everything is like that you have to be willing to suck at something in order to be great at it and the problem is most people aren't willing to suck because they're worried about what other people are going to think about them they're worried about the opinion of strangers that they're never going to meet online they're worried that their friends are going to make fun of them and interestingly when I first started posting content there was a group of girls that I was friends with and they screenshot my content and posted it into a group chat to make fun of it and I think one of them felt guilty and told me about it eventually um obviously I'm not friends with those people anymore but that's people's greatest fear is what if our friends make fun of it what if our family and and our you know people don't support it like what if people think I'm stupid I have never met someone on their deathbed who has ever said to me I wish I hadn't shared that thing.

48:48I wish I hadn't done that thing. I wish I hadn't gone for more and not actually got it. I wish I'd not started trying to train for that marathon. And you know, every single person who's going to die says, I wish I'd done the thing that I didn't do. So you can either be one of the millions of people who regret the things that they don't do, or you can just go for it, accept it's going to be embarrassing, or moreover, just decide that you're not going to be embarrassed, because it's only embarrassing if you're embarrassed, right? And that's one of the big things that's taken me probably from where I was a couple of years ago to where I am now is I'm not embarrassed by anything.