Everything you need to know about building a personal brand - Chris Donnelly

0:00Success isn't just about having a great product or service. You're an entrepreneur with a groundbreaking idea, but you're struggling to gain traction. You've built an amazing product, but sales aren't taking off as expected. What's missing? The answer may lie in something that's often overlooked, your personal brand. In today's noisy, crowded marketplace, it's not enough to just have a great offering. To truly stand out and succeed, you need to build a powerful personal brand that establishes your expertise, credibility, and unique voice. But where do you even start? How do you grow an engaged following whilst also running your business?

0:38And how do you translate that audience into meaningful results? To unpack this crucial topic, I'm thrilled to be joined by my mate, Chris Donnelly. Chris is the founder of two successful businesses, Burb and Lottie. But he's also built an enormous personal brand with over 35 million content views per week. Brands are lining up to work with him, and he's become one of the most sought-after voices in entrepreneurship. In our conversation, Chris shares his insights on the power of personal branding for founders. We dive into the nuts and bolts of how he grew his audience, including the importance of consistency, experimentation, and cultivating an authentic voice.

1:19But we also go deeper, discussing the mental challenges of putting yourself out there, how to partner with others to accelerate growth and how to leverage your audience to drive business results. And it's true, building a strong personal brand isn't easy. It requires consistency, vulnerability and a willingness to experiment. But here's the thing, this isn't just about follower counts or vanity metrics. As Chris puts it, everything is downstream from attention. The audience and credibility you build can be rocket fuel for your business, opening doors and creating once-in-a-lifetime opportunities.

1:54If you've been hesitating to prioritise your personal brand, consider this your wake-up call. Entrepreneurship is not for the faint of heart, and those who can cut through the noise and build real connection will have an undeniable edge. Okay, let's get on with it. My conversation with Chris Donnelly. Let's do this.

2:19hey chris hi mate there is a saying you're probably familiar with it everything is downstream from attention yep what do you think of that i mean it's certainly been true of of my life so far i think it's uh i think if more people understood it i think they would find life a bit easier um but it's definitely true like in in every industry in any job and anything almost like if you're the one who gets most of the attention you'll get most of the opportunities um which is true of like a graduate through to like middle management or a ceo through to an entrepreneur it's the same concept in pretty much everything is there an inherent problem with that where a lot of people on social media are just painful attention seekers who don't actually know very much about the world obviously not everyone but so many don't know much about the world and are just constantly trying to hack attention and it can all be very distracting because fundamentally people are quite confused about who to trust so how do we square off the attention side to the trust side well i think that's more on the the reader or the watcher that will happen forever that's happened forever people will always be trying to you know hijack people's attention and and profit of people's interests and and so forth and you've seen that so much in the last couple of years with like prominent people like tate etc but i mean the the thing i would always put out on my content is if you're gonna read from someone or watch someone make sure that you know what they've actually done and actually accomplished to make sure you research the people that you're listening to um and i think if more people did that i think that things would be generally better but it is very easy to lie these days and you have like a massive rise of unqualified experts um which obviously you're seeing a lot with people being exposed these days um so who to follow yeah personal preference i would say really put some time into researching who you follow when you were like building your business in your 20s because that's when we met right we met whilst you were building verb and i was yeah and i was building gravel very different businesses what did you think about attention then because at that time i was quite literally you know more concerned with is my business going out of business you know how do i hang on to my staff?

4:33How do I pay the wage bill? And I suppose in that regard, I'm probably, I was probably more like a typical business owner than anything else. And I actually talk about this in a book I'm writing, which is there was a pretty sort of monumental moment for me where I woke up one morning and had an email that is a direct message on LinkedIn from the head of marketing at Bugatti. And she had emailed me, we weren't even connected. And she had said, I follow all of your content I love the way that you talk about running your business I love the way you talk about culture I would love to talk to you about the upcoming marketing brief for Bugatti Global and our clients at the time were like you know standard bog standard clients you know they were paying a couple hundred quid to a couple thousand pounds and then they came in with this like million pound brief and I remember pretty much after that being like wow if if all the marketing that we do at verb was good and was expensive and was geared towards getting clients and my i suppose thought leadership as it was i didn't call it that back then but talking about how i was running a business publicly had led to a million pound client and not just any it was bugatti there's only one bugatti i was like wow there must be some serious power in this and we we we did over like three or four weeks go and pitch them in germany and and have this amazing experience and won them and on that plane journey back from them I remember saying to my business partner Ben Askins at the time and being like you know we're definitely not the best we were like laughing a few drinks in laughing being like we're definitely not the best agency we're probably not the most qualified for it but like she found us and isn't that quite something and that actually was I suppose my like eureka moment of you know this is powerful.

6:21Do you think that there's a difference in, uh, in the impact of the stuff running B2B versus B2C? Yeah. I mean, contextually my business that I used to run verb was we were looking for clients to book us to do marketing for them, you know, so B2B business, uh, it became very much focused on luxury towards the sort of later three or four years of, of, of the business. But for that, you can make a perfect argument that my personal brand and my online presence that were ended up driving over 50 % of the inquiries for the business, which is so powerful considering how much marketing costs to try and get in front of these brands.

7:02Nowadays, I run a business with my brother called Lottie, which is a care home marketplace B2C. And it is very different in that the externalities of the personal brand are less obvious. But when we came to fundraise, we had the most opportunity probably in the market, We had the most inbound I reckon anyone's ever really come across. When we look to hire people, we have hundreds of applications. And I think that Lottie became very well known very quickly because, you know, on the day that we launched it, I got to post it and got, you know, hundreds of thousands of views on day one. So it has serious leverage.

7:38And then there is a B2B element that, again, is very useful. What do you think has changed in over the last couple of decades around sentiment? and around attitude from founders regarding building audience? My first experience of it obviously changed me, but I remember at the time saying, I'm never posting photos of myself. I'm never doing video. Like I will only write, you know, email and LinkedIn basically. But as time has got on, you know, you get more comfortable doing it and you progress. And I think that founders used to see it as a bit sort of lame and used to see it as a bit sort of unqualified experts.

8:19And there's the whole imposter syndrome piece as well. But I think that if you look at it in the most binary sense of the world, if you're gonna acquire a million views to your business, you would pay a lot for that. You pay an extraordinary amount, especially if they were the qualified views. And then you sort of reverse it out and think from a personal brand perspective, if you're quite good on something like LinkedIn, you can get a million views relatively easily. and like it doesn't cost you nearly the same as paying for you know ads or whatever so i think people are starting to realize that people trust brands a lot less people follow brands a lot less you know you've got complete democratization of media going on where you know the individual is becoming incredibly powerful like if i was to advertise a b2c brand i would i would look to find five or six influences in that space and i would go deep on working with them i'd have them and my content you know so i think people are starting to recognize that you know it's a huge competitive advantage if you can nail it and i always i always think there's a very you know if i think of a personal perspective but also applies to most people if if you were a luxury agency back in the day and then we were your competitor even back then we were getting millions of views on our personal profiles every single day and so if you were our competitor it was hard for you you were doing ppc you were doing paid social media you were doing emails you're sponsoring conferences but every day the clients are reading our posts on linkedin and so it's like a it's an outsized advantage and i think people are clocking that hmm i can speak from my experience or one of my one of my you know negative self-talk things that i still feel actually i try to work out as i'm asking a question do i still think this i do still think this but uh through practice feel a little bit less what my team will think about me it's a great question because and to what you said at the start all you see nowadays is people posting about culture and running an amazing business and how amazing the staff is and stuff but that stuff will bite you in the ass if you're not authentically a good leader and so I post about that stuff a lot but But I also, as you know, like I put so much time and effort into making sure that the environment that people work in is amazing.

10:37And so if I was just posting and not doing the real stuff, obviously, I think the disconnect would be very, very real. And a lot of people suffer from that. But like you, I think that, you know, imposter syndrome is something that you can practice yourself to not overcome, but certainly, you know, minimize. and like you i mean i i've had the imposter syndrome around social around personal brand forever um but as time goes on and on and on and you achieve more and you you practice what you preach you can reduce it but it will always stay with you i think have you ever had negative feedback or difficult conversations with your colleagues about being online and so social um i think the only real challenge i ever had was so my previous business i sold in 2021 and i sold it to a private equity backed agency and i used to post a lot about you know culture about leadership about you know building a great business giving your people you know the best lives that you could at the same time as a good job um and obviously we got bought and immediately i lost the ability to control how the company you know ran and there was a i had to stop posting about it because there was a massive disconnect between how this company wanted to run the business and treat people versus how i did but i had sold it and so i completely lost the ability so for a year i actually had a bit of a sort of crisis because i was like i don't know what i can post anymore because i can't authentically say it's the best place in the world to work anymore because i can't control that anymore so so you started a new company so that you had good content um i mean i suppose nowadays i post about a lot more than what i did back then and so in many ways i'm thankful that it happened because it forced me to sort of expand what i talk about and and you know what i read about and educate myself on but obviously yeah i mean i always try and run a place that people would like to work yeah um one of the things i've learned you know let's use LinkedIn as a specific example.

12:42One of the things that I did and was quite known for was building in public. So sharing all of our information, our revenue, our growth numbers, everything completely transparently. People really enjoyed that. And I had an agreement with my business partner, Joel, that that's what we were going to do. Deeply uncomfortable for him. He doesn't really use social media at all. He doesn't like any of that stuff. But we agreed that was exactly what we were going to do because I was basically adamant that if I was going to start a business, that's what I wanted to do. um but there was always this sort of like that's okay but other stuff not okay and going to like a gray murky area like as business partners about what we could post what i could post online about heights because to me i was like i mean if you're posting everything revenue growth bad month terrible month awful month like etc everything else in between is kind of whatever it's not really a big deal that's the worst thing that you could definitely shamefully admit um but i learned that wasn't necessarily the case.

13:38And so he certainly got uncomfortable with quite a lot of the stuff that I was sharing in that manner. And we ended up having a good conversation about it. And ironically, and this was, you know, all I ever posted on LinkedIn was about heights, really. And I wasn't really growing and I wasn't really doing it to grow or be a creator. It's just that that's what that's what I saw as the value of LinkedIn was sharing a startup journey, raw, honestly, truthfully. And to me, like the kind of thing no one else does. Everyone just talks about the end yeah and looking back all the good bits yeah all the good bits and this is the narrative back and i was like i'd love to do all the bad bits and it'd be an amazing record of a startup journey no matter how it goes um what actually happened was you know he didn't want me to do that anymore other than the stuff we'd agreed to and so i stopped really posting about heights which then as a content problem was like well i like linkedin i like posting about stuff what should i post about yeah and ended up actually you know going more into like the psychology and leadership and this and that and stories of entrepreneurs which is the stuff we do on secret leaders and stuff otherwise and interestingly my linkedin started growing considerably more i think the lesson that i learned from that was if you focus all your content on you your business what you're doing how you do things etc it might work for one or two people but generally speaking it's actually not interesting enough it's not very it's not enough variety it's not actually good enough content in general to be a good growth strategy by the very nature, ironically, of being asked to stop posting all the time about heights.

15:06And so having to figure out what am I going to post about and finding lots of other things to post about that I find interesting that I wanted to write about, my LinkedIn grew enormously. So I guess I wanted to know if that surprises you or that is sort of consistent with your views on how to do LinkedIn well, like how if you were going to be a creator, how to grow and build an audience there. Does that sound? Yeah, I mean, that sounds consistent. You know, the i obviously run a care home marketplace which is a very successful business but if i posted about that every single day i would quite i'd go backwards you know people would eventually get bored of it and it's not because it's not an amazing business it's just because eventually there's not that much more to say and like you don't you never want to seem like you're selling too hard and so for me like i think the piece of advice i always give to you know people who are about to become creators or want to become creators or want to leverage that massive upside is you should become good at talking about what interests you and the ideas that interest you because they will interest other people and then if you're clever with promoting your business you will you know do some amazing posts on leadership what you've learned the lessons that are applicable to other people you know what can you post that you know is going to help people with their productivity or business culture or whatever and then deliver your business message and I always do this you'll see that me do this on my my social all the time I very rarely talk about my own businesses but when I do I would have spent two or three days beforehand making sure that I'm landing quite viral content so the impressions on my accounts are massively up and so I can deliver a really powerful message about my own business and so for for entrepreneurs I mean well for anyone.

16:49I think it's, it's a bit of a missed trick. You know, I get something like 35 million views a week on my content, which is insane. If you were to buy that, it would be just unaffordable. And most of my audience is, you know, aware of my businesses. But if I post about them every day, my views will just, will just crash. Okay. How do you put yourself out there? This is a big thing, right? So you're going from scratch. You are interested in building an audience, things you're saying make sense, how to actually do it? So comfortability is a big question. And like I say, at the beginning, I was like, I'm never posting a photo.

17:23I'm never doing video. I'm just writing. And funnily enough, for me, writing was definitely how I started. You know, I just wrote every single day on LinkedIn. And I think LinkedIn is a good place for people to start because you don't have to give away that much of yourself. You know, it's not that uncomfortable. If you get into doing video all the time, you have to have like long video shoots which are exhausting and you know there's no you can't really scrub what you say you know and it's out there it's you whereas writing feels less invasive so I would say to people if you're uncomfortable start writing and set yourself like the one goal which would be no matter what I will post seven days a week and as a basic goal the thing that I mean people always say consistency is the thing that makes a difference and of course it does it won't get you to the top I mean I know a lot of people who post every day and they post garbage so like the the baseline would be posting very regularly um so yeah i i started posting five days a week to begin with and moved it to seven as time went on um but i think the the the advice i try and give people is on on starting you need to understand what you are going to talk about because you can't start every day being like what's my post going to be today because also So practically, I run my business and I run my sort of personal brand business.

18:40I can't be spending all day thinking about what my LinkedIn post is or what I'm posting that day. And so I think you should sit down and say, these are the four topics I talk about. These are the sorts of formatted posts I talk about. This is my content. I know I'm going to post about this, this and this. And they might be four different types of, you know, types of content. You might be reading something. You might be reacting to something. And you should do it in batches. So that when you come to the day, it's already scheduled, it's already done, you know, you don't have to interact. And by doing that, you take the stress off it.

19:11And then I wouldn't, people get so upset if their posts don't perform. Whereas for me, I just look at an aggregated line, you know, like I just want the line to be going upwards. And if something doesn't work, I'll probably try it a few more times. If it doesn't work, I'll just count it as an idea. And so I treat it very much like a business because, again, where can you buy 35 million views? It's like near impossible. Whereas everything that I, you know, everything that I do nowadays, I feel like I'm one or two or three steps ahead of other people because I can just bring this huge viewership to whatever I'm doing.

19:46And my audience know that I am authentic with the things that I say, like I actually run a business. And so I can talk about running a business. And I think that's the starting point would definitely be put a good plan in place. Don't just post as it were. if you don't have experience yet so say you're 21 and you're hearing this and you're like if i'd like to be a linkedin creator i'd like to be a tiktok creator i'd like to be whatever instagram youtube doesn't matter the platform right um how like you don't have expertise yet well i mean obviously they would disagree with that because all 21 year olds think they're very expert but yeah what what should one talk about well like you say it's all relative at 21 i certainly thought i was an expert on marketing correct um and so if i was 21 now i would i would do the exercise i would say what are the things i'm interested in most and also i think like you've got to be a bit ruthlessly strategic about it so something like linkedin leadership culture um ai these are all like inherently viral topics you know people hr hr culture like all that sort of stuff and there are some you know some posts you can do which are things that everyone agrees with you give yourself a good leg up in terms of impressions and views and and and interest from off the bat it's not not too hard to decode what is already viral topics you know um and so as a youngster i put down my interest and then i would put down the thing i'm trying to achieve so my first business the thing I was trying to achieve was leads for my agency and so I knew that brands would want to follow an individual who talked about marketing I knew that you know people would want to see someone talk about leadership and culture and in the end my it kind of it kind of evolved but I talked about leadership culture business marketing and I went very deep on marketing but not just luxury marketing or all types of marketing.

21:46And so I picked topics that were already quite viral and things that interested me. If you're really interested in super niche things, that's fine, but you should know upfront that your potential audience size is going to be quite small. So you talked about how, to an extent, like how to put yourself out there, but why do you even want to do it? I mean, you've mentioned obviously big audience and stuff, but draw a little bit deeper. So why to do it? So all I can really speak to is the people that I have worked with. I can talk to what's happened to me. But I suppose the concept is leverage at the end of the day.

22:26Like I have an enormous amount of leverage that I can bring to anything that I do. So I have a, you know, an audience that if I start a business tomorrow, it's B2B, I can immediately post about it and get millions of views. and like I say like as a startup as a business that would be invaluable basically I think that in the in the context of a person with a with a job so I talked to a lot of graduates who say I want to build a personal brand people would say why would they build a personal brand internally but if you were at a law firm or management consultancy firm you were 21 as a graduate and you posted content regularly and got thousands and thousands of views everyone in your own organization will know you the partners will know you it'll be good press for them you might end up you know resulting in new clients or press opportunities and so you're just building yourself outsized leverage immediately which is when it comes to pay rises promotions and so forth you'll be looked at fondly because you have both things now you both have the carrot and the stick so they're like this person's amazing because they give you know upside to the firm but also I don't really want to annoy this person because they have 25 ,000 engaged graduates who are graduating next year who might want to look at our firm or not look at our firm.

23:41So there's almost, in my mind anyway, if you're comfortable with it, quite infinite upside. Because if you roll it all the way forward to, for example, what I've done, brands will want to work with you. brands will sponsor you you know any any businesses out there will approach you and offer you to be you know executive or non-exec and they'll offer you equity i mean the leverage becomes quite crazy towards the end but as a business owner the most obvious thing is is staff and team so you know lot is like 75 people now and we never use recruitment agencies ever never have to um and yet when we put out a job role we will just get hundreds of people applying for a role and And it's because we have this big presence.

24:26So I think as well, if you're in a corporate role, which again, a lot of the people in my audience are, they will say, what's the point in building it? And a lot of them are thinking about a side hustle. They're thinking about future business. If you can build something, some audience, 10 ,000, 20 ,000 people on LinkedIn, it's not too challenging to do that. By the time you come to your side hustle, day one, you can find clients. Whereas if you're speaking to an empty room, it's going to be much much harder let's talk strategy and tactics okay so uh i'm working in an organization or i'm a founder whatever clean slate no social media where do i start i think it depends who you are if you're comfortable on camera the upside on the video platforms is insane um what does that mean so you know everyone last year told me that Instagram was impossible to grow on.

25:18And in six months, I think I grew at 250K audience and 10 million views a week. And it was on business bite size business culture content. So if you're good on video, TikTok and Instagram are an amazing place to go because the platforms are competing with each other. And so they're giving an enormous amount of viewership to people so that they keep them on their platforms. So if you can do video, I would say look at those. Also on top of that is the monetization aspect of those platforms. So something like TikTok has the creativity beta program. So if you get millions of views, you're also making tens of thousands a month just from your viewership.

25:57Same with YouTube, same with Facebook and so forth. If you're more of a writer, then I would say LinkedIn is your place to start. And I would say, pick your topics, pick your focuses, what is your goal? Why are you doing it? And then start writing every single day. And the thing I talk about a lot is like my audiences and the platforms they are on will change. The platforms will change drastically. And so you might actually lose those audiences in the future. And you've seen this loads of people with big Twitter accounts or Instagram accounts are starting over completely. And it's because the audiences are dead or inactive or no longer there.

26:35And so I always talk to aspiring creators or creators about trying to de-platform people to your own newsletter. or I would say probably YouTube is a great place to de-platform people too, because it's second biggest search engine. It's not going anywhere in a long time. So how do you bring people off those platforms and to your central list? I think is not very talked about, but very important. So how do you do it? Talk us tactically like a little bit of a, LinkedIn for dummies, Instagram or TikTok for dummies. Yeah. Newsletter for dummies. Let's start with LinkedIn. in this point is the same for all social media platforms if you want to gain millions of followers you will need like a team and that's like a team of friends i don't have to work with you but it's that sort of principle that like one plus one does equal three you know if i have two or three of my close friends who are starting the journey at the same time you know we're going to engage each other's content we're going to push each other you know if you have the accountability you're doing it every day i'm doing it every day the accountability is a huge part of it so you know people will look at my audience now and be like wow it's unbelievable like it's unachievable etc but I built it in 18 months you know like I quite literally built the whole audience bar a little bit to start with on LinkedIn in 18 months from scratch and I have you know a clip a few close friends who we said to each other we're going to do this every single day and so even on days I didn't want to I didn't want to let them down I didn't want to ruin their accountability and so I think that concept is super important early on is to find people who want to achieve the same things push them and you know you can be you can be competitive with them you can be happy for them you know you always want to grow a little bit more than them I mean that's just human nature but having that crew is is is key because I have like four or five people around me that post similar stuff that I do and so forth but they always make mistakes and then And I learn from the mistakes before I even post.

28:31And so my sort of iteration wheel is just faster than if I was on my own. So step one, I would say like, get some friends who are doing it. Or in my regard, I was a smaller creator who reached out to bigger creators and said, I wanna learn from you. I will like engage your content as much as I possibly can. I will support you, promote you. I used to do posts about big creators and how amazing they were, but it was me trying to, I suppose, curry favor with them. and then I got into this big group of people who are professional creators and I'm not you know I'm I would say business owner first but then I was pushed so hard by them to you know to keep up with their levels so that was I think step one is accountability partners and um you know don't try and do it on your own and then I suppose tactically yeah I would put together your why more than anything because again if you're posting 365 days a year it is exhausting like what the hell are you going to talk about like don't be afraid to repeat the same thing so i would always say like with my content there will be repetition every three months of old stuff it might be in a slightly new format it might be in a new image it might be drawn differently written slightly differently but conceptually very similar and that's because again there's not that much new in the world you know So you actually, especially if your audience is growing quickly, you know, like I, for example, on LinkedIn, I gained 50 ,000 followers in a week.

30:00So that those 50 ,000 followers presumably not seen so much my previous stuff. And so if you sort of extrapolate in a few months time, there'll be hundreds of thousands of my audience who haven't seen many of my old posts. So I think repetition is key. So that brings you to the idea of like having tenants that you rely on. Like these are the things I believe in. These are the things I live. and so these are the things i will talk about um so yeah accountability and then putting your plan together and then i suppose the experimentation part is key so if you are posting every single day you've got to be super intentional about understanding why things are working why they aren't don't keep like i know so many people who post the same stuff all the time never works but they never seem to want to experiment with it whereas i would always say if you want to grow rapidly on social media it's actually about understanding pre-qualified content as in pre-verified viral content so for example i talk a lot about leadership and i did this post a couple of years ago called people talk about red flag all the time in leadership i did a post called the green flags leadership i hadn't really seen it before but it was an idea that i had with a team that piece of content anyone can post that now and it'll go viral and i see people post it all the time and it goes viral and so as in they're reposting your post they're taking the idea of green flags what i posted originally which for linkedin's like it was like 150 000 likes or something in like a couple of days like 7 million views on one post now people can post that as a concept regularly and they will get traction they might have to change up the the what for them signals green flags and leadership and so so i wouldn't work i wouldn't i don't think people need to work as hard as they are like you can take a lot from what happens out there from other creators you love and that's like my main point to people who are new find five to ten creators that you absolutely love you love their content and it might be you love this stream of content from one or this stream from another and then bring it all together in your inspiration and so that's exactly what i did when i first started you know posting it's like i love personal development from this guy or I love how deep this person goes on business stuff.

32:10And then it was like, okay, I can kind of see my brand of content, which are things I'm super interested in, but also I know this stuff will do well. And then, you know, be ruthless. Like I actually am pretty obsessed with AI because I think that it just feeds so much of what I've done previously in my life. I'd love to have had it when I was first starting businesses, et cetera, or in school. But even if you don't, I would force yourself to talk about topics that are in the news, because if you're smart and news jack on a platform like LinkedIn, you can just go viral overnight type thing. And look, it's ironically, whether you're an expert on AI or not, it's new for most people.

32:54Yeah. So there's another approach I think that's not really talked about yet by you, which is I'm learning in public. I'm learning this thing I don't know either I've just played with uh Claude and these were my amazing results you know that's still interesting for people you don't know not all not all content has to actually be expert content sometimes quite nice to just do the this is what I learned this week yeah yeah and actually turn that into really authentic and valuable content for other people that can go viral yeah so I do a lot of curation with uh content nowadays so I did a lot of my AI learning publicly i did a lot of like i've just discovered this i'm playing with this these tools are super interesting look at what you can use it for how it's applicable to content how it's applicable to business and then i started doing curation of the things i had used to learn and that content is super valuable because people go okay i trust chris i followed him for a while i know he talks about these things he's learning ai and therefore i don't have the time to learn it myself as he is but i can learn from how he learned it and those again it's like it's not as hard to post that content i don't have to create that much new stuff i just have to you know be quite conscious about if i'm learning from these courses i can now recommend those courses i actually think that's a really valuable point though curation there's so much noise everywhere so actually another expert thing you can do as a creator is be a curator like find the best content and be known to make that stuff simple and clear for people in one place.

34:26Yeah. Easy as well to, as in if you're thinking ruthless, you know, ruthless efficiency with growth, if you're recommending four or five other creators and their amazing work, they're more likely to recommend you back. You're more likely to carry favor with them. Their audiences might see your work. They might reshare you. And so you've got to think about content first and foremost. It's like the absolute key. But then you think about distribution more than anything, which is how is my content when I have no followers going to go out into the masses? And it's like if you're if you're doing it completely authentically, you would talk about lots of other people you would engage.

35:04But the slightly less authentic way, but very effective way of doing it is, you know, there's 30 other creators who talk about the same thing. You engage them, they engage you. And even if you do it officially or unofficially, if you're just starting your account, I would say if you're going to spend years and years and years focused on content creation why would you not give yourself the leg up and people people will hate me saying that and they'll say it's inauthentic or whatever the game is the game the game is the game and basically there are rules in the game yeah and part of the thing is actually understanding what the rules are which are hidden and obfuscated from most people because people like to pretend that the game isn't the game i know that sounds like overly deep but in reality that is like i think one of the things we've both experienced which is most people do not want to actually share how to grow on any of these social platforms at all yeah and they sell courses and all sorts of things about how to and they actually regurgitate the same stuff which has nothing to do with how to yeah it's absolutely wild so the linkedin so far you've said you know find your uh your content mix understand exactly like the areas you're going to speak about don't uh just regurgitate stuff that's not working like hone in on the things that are pay attention to it and focus more on posting the stuff that does uh make sure that you're doing it with friends engaging with each other etc what's next how do you ace the game on linkedin from zero to one or zero to one thousand well all that stuff is what you need to do to to to get good i think to to get yourself to a point where you're you're doing quite well and you're gaining traction to to level to the point where a couple of you know my friends and myself are where you know i think i have the fastest growing linkedin account that there is you know certainly whenever i look at the rankings it will always be the fastest growing and now it's probably at a point where on average i'll get on just on linkedin 20 million views a week which is obviously slightly mind-blowing if you want to do that then i think that you have to super professionalize the whole thing it has to be a pretty military operation so what does that mean what like tell what is your military operation so for me i mean i have a full-time staff member who just works on my linkedin yeah and that is sourcing content it's looking at what's performed previously really well on my content other people's content what's in the news how do we then create deeper content more complex content for people to to engage with and so it brings us to this point which is like okay there's different types of content that have different objectives and different outcomes so there is content that gains huge virality views and impressions which won't convert to followers so let's just hold that here for a second and then there is content that that really makes people consider and think and want to save your content and we keep that right here if you post this stuff all the time you'll have very low impressions you might convert followers at a good ratio but you're not going to grow very quickly and so accounts like mine what i will try and do is i will try and post high virality stuff so stuff i know has gone viral previously of my own stuff or other people's and try and put a a more complex message to it so you might post something a well-known meme or image about failure or you know these sort of workplace graphics about failure but then i'll i'll write a complex understanding of how i've dealt with failure and how you can overcome it but I know that post will do well that will gain millions of impressions the next day I will do a post on how to use AI to create content and it will be a deeper more complex you know infographic or so forth that people will see and they'll want to save and so they immediately have to follow you for more content like that or even you can say if you want me to send you it you can subscribe to my newsletter and so you've got to become very intentional about the type of content that you do and then again if you want to promote your business or something you want to be doing that after a couple of high high virality high impression posts because again you know your business stuff isn't going to go viral immediately so you've got to kind of play the game a bit to give it a bit of a launch and presumably then you do the company staff and then it brings the engagement back down again and so you need to build it up again and more viral posts?

39:22And is that essentially the system? Recently, I've taken, I've worked with other creators who have done really, really viral illustrations. And I've done that at the beginning of the week. And I've had weeks recently where I've got my impressions up to 20 to 30 million impressions in a week. And I've delivered, you know, 40 or 50 ,000 followers in a week through high conversion posts towards the end. And so you've got to play the game. You know, it's effectively like if I was to deliver a message and sell product to people, I would want to fill the room first. And that's exactly what the concept is.

39:55Yeah, it's fascinating because it's actually essentially the same as a marketing funnel. Identical. And that's when I say like you've got to professionalize it. I was a professional digital marketer for 12 years. I did this for businesses and celebrities forever. And then I suddenly thought if I'm going to do this for myself, I don't want to spend forever growing an audience. I want to do it as fast as possible, as efficiently as possible. And I don't want it to take over my life. I don't want to think about it all the time. I don't want to be on social media all the time myself. I want to get it into a place where I have outsized leverage and opportunity in my life.

40:30And nowadays, you know, I'll get invited to speak at most conferences. And even if you don't want to, you still have the opportunity to. And I've got this engine now that creates content on the video side. It's very similar. You know, I don't have a long form content strategy, but that's what I'm going to be pushing into next. But the short form stuff is very similar. You look at what's working, what your audience likes if someone likes one of your videos they're more than likely gonna like the same concept again and again and again so you've got to be very efficient with that how does one find a good concept like what is a process you went through to find the concept that you've been using and like rinse and repeating which is essentially like tearing down bad bosses and bad bad messages at work so i mean the funny thing about that is that's actually based on And for years, I've talked about like good management and bad management.

41:22And I think it's because when I was younger, I had really bad bosses. Yeah, I did too. In hospitality, they were awful. And I had one professional job, like two professional jobs. One manager was awful. One was okay. And then when I sold my business, the people we sold to were awful people. And so it sort of reignited the fire of like, what are bad bosses? And everyone's had a bad boss. And so it's as a concept, it's applicable to everyone. everyone can resonate with a boss being a dick when you're a little bit late when the traffic's bad or like you know when you're prioritizing your children over your work and your boss treats you like you're a child and it's like well I love my job but my child is more important to me and so I as a concept it works really well and it's very engaging with the audience it's very suspenseful you know people like a story they like what happens next the other thing I do which does really really well it's I call out on uh entrepreneurs so like the the obvious people who have gained massive online following but from effectively complete you know lying and and and you know creating these stories and faking it and posing next to Lamborghinis and you know all that sort of flash without any of the substance and then they sell you a course that never really delivers and so I do that a lot and people like that because I think anyway because I have run two big businesses now people think I'm authentically credible enough to both speak about to speak about what's good and what's bad and I think that's a great format because I always think the reason I post is I would love to have read my content when I was 21 and that's like my underlying thing obviously it's expanded nowadays but that's what I remember doing at the beginning is like I would love to create content that my 21 year old super imposter syndrome entrepreneur would love to engage with and so that sort of drives a lot of the formats nowadays so that's the one thing that i think uh people miss myself included who are you writing for um or who are you creating for who's your target audience again same as when you're building a brand but i find it very challenging doing personal brand stuff to think that way because it's all very meta and i struggle with that um who are you writing for then is it 21 year old entrepreneurs broadly like people who are looking to create so i think when i first started making content it was definitely that it was i want to create content that will guide people through you know i had seven years as an entrepreneur and i wasn't you know i wasn't particularly good at networking i wasn't particularly good at getting out so i never spent any time with other founders i just yeah we've talked about this yeah and it's it's wild really but like i sat in a room in brick lane and i worked every hour of the day and that's all i did i never gave myself any chance of outsized leverage or opportunity or network or anything and i just worked really really really hard and i and i you don't have to work that hard you don't have to sacrifice that much like especially if you're strategic about it you can create massively outsized opportunity and then work less than you than you are you know i spent years trying to get clients that notice our brand and all i could have done instead is write online every day so how much time do you think you do spend or how much time does one need to spend your average joe who is trying to run a business i guess they're not that average in the first place but our typical listener yeah who's a founder busy founder like you but you're like hearing this stuff and you're like full-time person it's another like employee in a separate company then like they need management i need to do this content or not you know it all starts to stack up like it's like is this a day a week is it like an hour a week give us some advice what does one do how do we build up so i think the the roadmap that i took in my first company is a great way of thinking about it which is i and and steve bartlett said this about social chain and it's the same thing in that it's much much easier to market steve bartlett than it is to market social chain it was the same thing with me and verb like we could put time and effort into making me a thought leader in marketing and luxury rather than getting verb onto the tip of everyone's tongues and then every single conference that happened in that industry i ended up becoming the luxury guy and so I was invited to speak at all the conferences just made things easier so I would say principally as a CEO I would say most of the time and you know there will be exceptions to this your job is the generation of business and it's the generation of revenue and bringing clients to your company and so I would say you will have a marketing budget for your brand and your business anyway I would just put some of that towards the intentional growth of your personal brand what i wouldn't do is outsource your personal brand everyone does it founders all over do it they go marketing team member i want to post five days a week you've got this but the thing is for you to make it excellent and for you to make it brilliant you need to be part of it personal brand for a reason so i would say you know take it seriously commit to one platform first um and like i said before it depends on how comfortable you are the different platforms but for most businesses and most founders I would say LinkedIn is a huge unlock and it's unbelievable the amount of traffic you get and the amount of people on the platform so sort of a why not and and if people are saying I don't have the time I would say I question whether you're working on the right things because as a business owner as you get more experience you realize that that phrase that you hear when you're younger about working on the on the business versus working in the business, you're like, yeah, no, of course.

47:08Like, of course. But then you get older, you go, oh, I really do know what that means. It means I don't work on these things. I outsource them to my team and I monitor the progress of them. And that's the relationship I have with my team is, you guys are delivering on this. My job is to bring outsized interest to our company. That is what I do for the company. And if you think about it like that, it makes your job is attention. And like you said at the beginning, everything's downstream from attention. Yeah. What about just managing your mental health? So I'll just, you know, that might be actually a very particular, I'll just bring more of myself into that conversation.

47:48How can you help me manage my mental health and my DMs? Might not be a problem for you, but you just get inundated. And I really like to be a good person. And I hate the idea, you know, reputation, reputationally, the bigger you are, the harder you fall and people make assumptions about you and people feeling unheard and like you're ignoring that. Like there's no choice after a while than basically just to ignore 99.9 % of these DMs. And that's at my size, which is maybe a 10th of your size. So it's like, it just, there is a point in time where it becomes unmanageable for even the best will in the world.

48:23Yeah. So how do you deal with that? Because also the other side of it is like trying to build community, right? Trying to build authentic engagement, trying to build real connection with people who are following your content and are giving you love and attention. You want to reward that and it's natural. You want it to feel like a two-way exchange, but how? It makes me think about something I didn't say earlier tactically, which is if you want outsized opportunity, you're going to have to work hard for it. Yeah. It's not easy. Everyone's going to do it. And moving forwards, I think most young business owners will see being a creator and an influencer alongside being a business owner as par for the course.

49:03And so upfront, I will say it's not easy. It is time consuming. Once you get to having an audience, then growing an audience can grow faster. But building the first part of the audience is really, really hard. And responding to DMs and building community and responding to comments is critical at the beginning. And I would even say like, I've moved into different formats this year and I have put so much time into responding to people, to engaging with people and so forth. but you do you get to a point where it's physically impossible if you think like a normal post every day on the platform is getting three million impressions or something that means that you're getting thousands of comments it's just it's just impossible so I put that in my comment I put it in my about section that unfortunately because of the size of the platform I can't respond to everything I will always try my best to.