Growing your personal brand: Does hiring make your business less you?
Kathleen and I hear about it all the time—do I come up with a business name or just use my own name?
There’s no right or wrong answer, just the one you’re willing to rock. And either way, because we’re creatives who sell ourselves in each transaction, it’s a personal brand we’re building, no matter the name.
As you grow your personal brand, you will—at some point in your bossdom—find yourself at a time when it will behoove you to get some help.
The easiest thing to hand off – I believe – is bookkeeping, because most of us hate to do that and accountants know what’s up. But what if you find yourself in a place where you need to hand off more front-facing processes, like someone to write your social media or handle your inbox?
Does hiring out things like writing or customer service make your personal brand less personal? Are you lying to the world?
Nope. You’re growing your brand.
Here’s how I like to put it into perspective:
If I called up Martha Stewart’s company right now, the last person in the world that would answer the phone would be Martha Stewart. Amiright?
Chances are that there’s something in your business that you’re really great at. Maybe a couple of things. Let’s say you’re here to be a painter. You’ve started your creative business to paint. You understand that you also need to be an entrepreneur for this to feed you, so you learn the ropes of building an online business, and you super love writing your bi-weekly emails. But what you hate doing is managing your Facebook page, and a lot of your business comes from Facebook.
Do you slug away at Facebook yourself, taking time from what you’re great at, or do you hire someone to manage it for you so that you can get back to the work that fulfills you?
A lot of creatives think that hiring someone to manage such front-facing content will make their business less them. I want to encourage you to reframe that mindset.
If you give proper guidance to a pro who’s going to help you rock out your social media/inbox/writing/photo editing/whatever you need help with, then – honestly – they’re going to do “you” better than you do you. And you’re going to be able to get back to what you’re best at and be even better at it, because this other thing in your business is being handled.
Don’t let the fear of making your personal brand less personal keep you from growing your business. If you hire the right people it will work for you in more ways than it could ever work against you.