Personal Branding: Don’t Do What I Did

Firstly, if you’re reading this in a feed reader then please hop on over to the actual site and you’ll see exactly what I’m talking about…otherwise you might get a little confused :)

You’ll hopefully see quite a radical change from before. That’s quite deliberate and it’s my way of saying…”enough’s enough” – the time has come to put my stake in the ground and brand myself properly.

If personal branding is an exercise you’re doing too right now, my best advice is this: Don’t do what I did…

So just what did I do? Let’s put it this way, whenever I meet people who know me online via Twitter or the Location Independent blog (met up in the flesh with a couple of online peeps recently), one of the first things they ask me is:

“So I know Jonathan’s the graphic designer/illustrator, but what do you do?”

The thing is, I have deliberately tried to keep it a little vague – not wanting to put myself in a box and label myself with something that ends up restricting what I do. But there’s the error…

In doing that, I’ve fallen into the #1 trap of marketing & branding: trying to be/appear to be all things to all people.

The stupid thing is that I know the importance of this rule and I’ve got it right with branding our business projects & ventures – just not with myself. So that’s the reason for the bold statement I’m making with this re-brand.

But it hasn’t been that easy…

One of the challenges that I’ve found whilst doing this is trying to figure out exactly what I excel at. Without blowing my own trumpet too much, I’m pretty good at most things I do. A blessing? Not necessarily – it can be more of a curse…

Unlike Jonathan whose natural artistic talents far outweigh many of his other skills, I’ve never had a strong inclination towards a particular skill/profession; it’s why I went into consulting (thinking it would give me the chance to find something I really enjoyed & was really good at – it didn’t, as I was good at everything and hated it all about the same amount).

So I needed to figure out just what it is that I can do better than most people I know.

Seth’s post recently held the answer. It’s not about my content knowledge – the fact I know a fair bit about business improvement, CRM, online marketing, health, fitness, worldwide travel or anything like that – it’s about my process knowledge.

And processes are something I really excel at. But calling myself a Process Expert or Process Consultant is really dull and still doesn’t tell people what I can help them do. So I honed in on one particular process that just about covers everything I do…problem solving. I am great at helping people solve problems – and I’m happy to boast about it too because I know I can do it.

I’m the kind of person who friends come to for advice, who can always see a way to get from A to B when others have no idea where to start and pretty much everything I’ve done in my professional career to date has been based on helping people solve a problem.

So that’s it – I’m now officially re-branding myself as a “Professional Problem Solver”. Still to define specific target markets but I’m happy with progress so far. It’s a step in the right direction at least. What do you think?