2411 - Personal Branding for Leaders Who Lead Quietly and Authentically with Brand of a Leader's Marina Byezhanova

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0:46Visit podverify.com if you'd like to be featured as a future guest. I'm Josh Elledge. Let's get into it. With us right now, Marina Biazhanova. Marina, it is so great to have you. You are the CEO of Brand of a Leader. You're found on the web at brandofaleader.com. Marina, thank you for joining us. Thank you so much for having me, Josh. Well, before we get going and talking about your superpowers and leadership, you and I were talking before we hit record, and I understand that you've got a fun trip coming up and it's kind of part of a tradition. Do you mind sharing a little bit about that? Of course.

1:26So travel is huge on my list of priorities because as I mentioned to you, I was born in the Soviet Union behind the Iron Curtain. I grew up convinced I would never travel anywhere. When my family moved to Canada and I saw that the world was my oyster, travel became more than just passion. And since I've become a mother, one of the things that I do, one of my traditions with the children since they were young is one-on-one trips. I have a daughter and a son and we travel together a lot, but I also at least once a year take a one-on-one trip with one of them. The last trip was to Barcelona, Spain in the fall.

2:02And in about 10 days from now, my son and I are going to Ireland. That's our one-on-one. Amazing. What do you have planned for Ireland? Oh, lots of things. So aside from just general visiting and he, it's really interesting it was a business trip to Ireland but my kids have a list of places they want to visit and their top places and my son who is now 10 has had Ireland on his list for a couple of years which just seems so unusual and so when this trip presented itself I said well come along there's a time of the trip where I'm in meeting so he's going to be with his nanny and then as soon as she departs we have a lot of one-on-one time together where we're visiting we're staying in some castle he's going to do archery um and just and just hanging out and then one of the things i also do uh josh is during those one-on-ones i'll let the kids do a lot of deciding of what they want to do i'll present them with options say do you prefer this do you prefer that and then they decide so they also feel more in control and in charge wonderful that sounds like an amazing time arena i can't can't wait to anyone who's connected with you on instagram probably can't wait either.

3:08So, because it's quite a picturesque country. Well, Marina, let's talk about brand of a leader. Tell me what you do. So we're a personal branding agency for Gen X CEOs and entrepreneurs, not personal branding as in someone is a solopreneur and wants to be Instagram famous. Not at all. These are business owners and CEOs who would rather not be building personal brands, but want to increase the visibility of their organization, support the marketing function of the organization through their own thought leadership. And we help them do that. Yeah. Well, OK, well, let's take us to a quick one on one on, I'd say, your unique message compared to maybe someone else that might say, oh, well, I'm a brand person, too.

3:54Yeah, so a couple of things. So one, the company itself was born out of and rooted in my own personal mission of helping people find their voice and scale the reach of their voice. As I mentioned, I was born and grew up in the Soviet Union. I know what it's like to not have a voice at all. As an immigrant to Canada, I know what it's like to not have a voice as an immigrant until I finally found mine. And so I've had this passion and this mission just not even connected to any monetization. monetization of inspiring people to increase their visibility, be themselves, scale the reach of their voices.

4:28From the business side of things, what we've done at Brand of a Leader is we've created quite a unique methodology that makes us quite different from our competitors. You know, one of our, I would say, personal missions is to be the number one most copied personal branding agencies in the world. And this comes from the methodologies and processes that we create. One of our differentiators, Josh, is that we don't view personal brand building as a PR persona creation process. We view it as a complete inside out process. Clients who come to us after having worked with other agencies say that they're really surprised that our process makes them feel like they're working with a therapist rather than a marketing agency.

5:12We're constantly digging deeper to understand the person on a deep level. Well, I absolutely love that. Rather than going into a room and saying, okay, well, we're going to make you up and this is going to be your persona. And here's the mask we're going to put on you because we think that that's, what's going to sell. No, thank you. No way. Like I wouldn't be able to, I wouldn't want to go to work if that's, you know, I was kind of forced to live, you know, this identity just because I thought it was marketable. Do you mind taking me through a little bit of that process to uncover how you get to, You know, because I suspect that there might be some people, some founders that, you know, maybe there's some misalignment, you know, between who they are and their own company.

5:58Or they may be in leadership with another company and they might feel this misalignment. And over time, I suspect, you know, that kind of wears at you a little bit. Definitely so. And there's also misalignment among people who have begun to put themselves out there, but really purely on the back of the work that they do. And one of our big beliefs at Brand of a Leader is that your personal brand is an expression of who you are, not only an expression of what you do. So the process that we take clients through, when we first define your brand identity, our goal is to identify what is that unique angle or point of view that encompasses, encompasses what you do, but expresses who you are.

6:40How do we arrive at it? And what are some of the exercises people at home can do? They're as follows. So we take you through the process of three calls, in-depth calls. As I said, it feels a little bit like therapy because the first call is we do what we call a lifeline with you. We take you through the entire journey of your life, personal and your entrepreneurial or leadership journey, the highs and the lows. And as you share the highs and the lows with us, we'll look for patterns and common denominators because often that becomes what we package into your brand angle. So we're listening for those things.

7:15We talk about the biggest influencers in your life. For a lot of people, it's their parents and maybe a teacher in childhood. And why? Again, looking for patterns, common denominators. We talk a lot about your core values. Often for our clients, their angle comes from a core value. So interestingly, the first two calls that we have with clients building their brand identity has nothing to do with their thought leadership and their work. This is just uncovering who is the person, who is this human being. Then we move into talking about, well, what are the topics that are resonant? What do you want to be known as a thought leader in?

7:51What is the humanizing topic also that you would be comfortable speaking about? And then we build out all of those different components. But the first step is to understand, well, who am I? and what part of myself am I going to package into this angle that will allow me to stand out. Marina, Gen Xers are kind of cool, I feel. Overall, not all of us, but I think most of us are pretty cool. What can you say about folks that are currently at that age group? I think it would be roughly mid-40s to mid-50s, somewhere in there. What's going on with us? I love Gen Xers. And as you pointed out, we only work with Gen Xers.

8:34And it says on our website that we're the agency for Gen Xers. So it was intentional. I love Gen Xers for a few reasons. First of all, they're called the forgotten generation. So they're kind of the underdog, which makes it really exciting to work with them and, you know, empower. Gen Xers are fascinating because we work with clients who really ideally don't want to be working with us because they don't want to be building visibility. They would rather be, you know, building their business or just not being self-promotional. So they're very nervous about being self-promotional. And we can show them that those things can be done with substance.

9:09They don't want that me, me, me, make me famous type of thing. That is fascinating. And then also they don't know the right approach for putting themselves out there, right? So we have a lot of conversations about the power of social media and just the pure fact that our younger employees expect us to have visibility. Gen Xers are fascinating because they are sitting on a ton of knowledge, a ton of depth and expertise and beautiful stories. And they're holding back on sharing them, whereas a lot of their younger counterparts are very loud all over the place, have advice for everyone rooted at zero experience or wisdom.

9:51So balancing that out is something that we're very passionate about a brand of a leader working with Gen Xers. Yeah, yeah. And so what, when someone has their brand aligned, I mean, obviously I would, you know, I kind of alluded to, you know, kind of just the psychological benefits of just appreciating that you're in alignment, you know, your company is in alignment with who you are and that's got to feel good. Now, naturally I would, Marina, that's, you're going to attract clients then that are going to be aligned with that, right? So even the fact that like when you say Gen X, well, even though they might be at that same age, I feel like Gen X is a little bit of an identity as well, right?

10:33And so some people are going to be like, that's just going to be attractive for some people. So, you know, part of like, you know, getting the brand right is you're just going to work with cooler people. You're going to work with people that you get along with, I think, or resonate or certainly have that values alignment. That's got to be a major plus here, right? As clients and as team members as well. And what's interesting also, Josh, as when we put ourselves out there and it's very clear who we are, what we stand for, our core values. Yes, we attract like-minded people, which is crucial. We also repel people who are not right for us.

11:07We had a client that called me once and she said, Marina, you won't believe what happened. I had a candidate that we had first interview with. And then she sent me an email saying, I went through all of your LinkedIn. I read all of your posts. You're not someone that I would like to work for. And so I would draw my candidacy. And my initial feeling was like, is the client calling me to complain? And she said, I am so happy because we saved each other so much time. I could have hired her and then we would have discovered that we're not a fit. So it's powerful both ways. Often people feel, well, what if then people don't like me?

11:39What if I repel people? It works and it works in a powerful, powerful way. But of course, more, more often than not, it attracts the right people to us, which is extremely, extremely powerful. Yep. Trust the filter. So brandofaleader.com, Samantha, when somebody goes to your website, you might maybe just sharing just a little bit about what your engagement looks like. I mean, you talked about that a little bit. But certainly, if you could share to our friend that's listening where they may go from here. So number one that I recommend is for you to book a call with us. And then we can chat. We make sure to give you as much value as possible on the call.

12:17So it's not a typical, we don't have those funnels where then we're just jiving something down your throat and you're saying, why did I book this call? They're putting pressure on me. None of that. We book a call. We really get to know you and we get to know you prior to the call. We run a personal brand audit on you. We scrape everything. We Google search. You see what comes up. We now search you up in LLMs and see what comes up. What are the sources that are giving this information on you? And we scrape your LinkedIn to see what you're posting. And so we come into this call really knowing you.

12:48And this is an audit we can share with you as well and give you really practical tips. So if you don't engage us, at least you walk away with something tangible. If you do engage us, then step number one, we build your personal brand identity. We create that clarity of your unique angle. We write your brand story. Because as you said, Drush, you really want to make sure you are aligned with your business. But you also want to make sure it doesn't define you. You want to make sure that your personal brand is much wider than your business because we are all bigger than our individual business or what we do.

13:19The brand story needs to express that. The brand angle needs to express that. We define your message and your content pillars, how we want you to be perceived, and a plan of action. That's the first part of our engagement. That's strategy. A lot of people skip it, but it's a must. And then after that, we support with execution as well. We help grow your LinkedIn profile. We write your LinkedIn content with you. You can't completely outsource it. We interview you. The thought leadership, the stories are all yours. We write thought leadership articles. We book you as a guest on podcast. We coordinate photo shoots for you.

13:52We build personal websites. So we do all of the fun execution as well. But it all starts with that, finding out the differentiator for you as part of strategy. Marina Biazhanova, your website is brandofaleader.com. Marina, it's been a great conversation. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you so much for having me, Josh.

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15:25Thanks again for spending your time with us. I'll see you next time.